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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.
He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.
In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.
Global Real Estate Project
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Real estate market in Russian European bigger cities
By the mid-1990s real estate prices in Russia's bigger cities went up in parallel with the trends set by the Moscow market. In St.Petersburg properties sold for as high as $650 per sq.meter (1 sq.meter=10 sq.feet) and in Yekaterinburg they reached $450-500 per sq.meter. The financial crisis in 1998 turned back these trends, and prices fell by up to half and in some towns by more than 75% from their pre-crisis levels. Prospects for all these real estate markets depend first of all on the national economic policy but also on the local economic initiatives. In a country as big as Russia it is always possible to find local governors who will take a risk to invite more foreign investors than the Kremlin thinks is appropriate. It is expected that prices for real estate in the second biggest Russian city of St.Petersburg (5 million) could go up. That is partly for pure political reasons. The new Russian president, Mr.Vladimir Putin, worked in the town several years ago; many of his ministers and advisers come from St.Petersburg and the president always has insisted that he prefers being there. The city had been for almost 2 centuries the capital of the Russian empire, so the informal proposal this summer by some members of parliament to move its lower house (State Duma) from Moscow to St.Petersburg wasn't taken just as another joke. Russia is a country of symbols. One of them is the city of St.Petersburg itself. Built by order of the emperor, Peter the Great. on a marshland almost 3 centuries ago, it had to symbolize the openness of Russia to the Western ideas and technologies. The current Russian president, on one hand, needs western capitals. His population, on the other hand, needs to know the direction the country is moving. If Putin chooses to move his state westward, the most elegant way of showing this to the entire population (and to the entire world) would be by increasing the importance of St.Petersburg in the Russian political life. As we have mentioned in our previous article about Moscow, political life in Russia has always taken an upper hand in the country's social development. So an eventual increase of the political influence of the second biggest city could easily move prices of properties upward from their current levels of $400-450 per sq. meter. The first step in this direction was made some months ago when the city was chosen by the president as one of the seven mega centers of the country in order to control more closely the elected regional governors. Other bigger Russian cities in the western parts of the country, such as Yekaterinburg (1,4 million), Kaliningrad (1 million), Perm (1,1 million), Samara (1,3 million) or Ulyanovsk (0,8 million) are still trying to recover from the losses of the financial crisis of August 1998. The current price levels in these cities are 40-50 percent lower than 3 years ago. Thus in the first half of 2000 the average prices per sq.meter in Yekaterinburg were $220-240, in Kaliningrad - $290-330, in Perm - $170-200 and in Ulyanovsk - $125-135. As we can see, the highest prices among these cities are recorded in the most western among the bigger Russian cities - Kaliningrad (this region is enclaved between Poland and Lithuania). The relatively higher prices there could be explained by the bigger demand, by the fact that the region is a free economic area and by the assumption that some day it could be incorporated within the larger European free trade area. On the other pole we see cities like Perm and Ulyanovsk, towns with one predominant industry which aren't too attractive to national or foreign investors. The prices in these cities may be calculated in US dollars as well as in Russian rubles (the prices in Moscow, St.Petersburg or Kaliningrad are set only in US dollars). This detail shows that customers there usually are people with no connections to the foreign markets and foreign currency and that the crisis can't be softened by the presence of foreign investors as in Moscow or in some other Russian big cities.
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See also the directory of companies providing real estate services in, and general real estate information of Russia.
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