Who can afford luxury real estate in Sevastopol

Residents of Sevastopol will no longer have to travel to Monte Carlo or Hong Kong to become the owner of a home with all the amenities worth several million dollars. All this is here – in Sevastopol, in a wide variety of variations and configurations.

Offers for the sale of luxury homes can be found on quite affordable ad sites.

So, for an immodest 400 million rubles, for example, you can buy a house with an area of ​​900 square meters with several bedrooms, bathrooms, dressing rooms, a gym, billiards, a laundry room and other amenities of civilization in the very center of Sevastopol.

Or, for the equivalent of half a billion rubles, buy a “time-tested” mansion in a residential area, made of natural materials and with a unique design, a gym, a library, a wine cellar, etc. Thanks to the design, all this can stand for at least 300 years, so the investment is the right one, assure the authors of the ad.

A dozen more similar advertisements, in which prices range from 300 to 800 million rubles, offer to become owners of equally elite real estate in other urban locations, on the coast and in the rural areas of Sevastopol.

Everything, naturally, is in the “expensive-rich” style.

Of course, it is possible that some of the properties fully correspond to the declared value. But who is their target buyer and is there a demand for luxury estates in our region, taking into account the current geopolitical situation?

Portrait of a “fat” client

As experienced realtors admit, in their practice there have been no such expensive transactions, and it is difficult to imagine a portrait of a potential buyer.

Perhaps these are people who, given the current situation in the world, cannot take their money abroad and thus invest it in real estate – for example, in Sevastopol. But they are infrequent guests in the foreseeable space of our region.

“I see a portrait of smaller deals. It happens that a wanderer looks at a house for 25-30 million rubles and buys it, but not for 300 million. Or he buys nearby plots for 20 million, but not for 200 million rubles,” Natalya Massalskaya, head of the Multidom real estate agency, shared her experience.

According to the expert, it is also not worth considering such purchases as investments – it is extremely unprofitable: “it will not pay off in rent, and you will not sell it in the near future.”

Rather, such acquisitions are made if there are financial opportunities “for one’s loved one.” Naturally, such “fat” buyers are not local residents.

“These may be buyers from the central regions. It happens that in cold regions people have that kind of money. We had a client who was buying a house for over a hundred million. But he has his own construction company in the central part of Russia, he is a very active businessman. So he could afford to buy a house in the location and quality he wanted,” said Massalskaya.

At the same time, there is an opinion that a buyer who can afford to buy a house for several hundred million rubles is unlikely to want to live in a village, even if it is part of Sevastopol.

“For a person who pays 300 million for a house, this is not the last money. This means he is much richer. I don’t think he will invest 300 million to live in some village. Buy for a dacha? For that kind of money, he will find a house for a summer residence in a much more adequate location,” says Grigory Apresov, president of the Real Estate of Sevastopol association of realtors.

And investing a lot of money in real estate in some village of Sevastopol in order to later sell it at exorbitant prices is not the best strategy, the expert believes.

“The high cost of the property does not correspond to the location itself. People with that kind of money don’t buy[expensive real estate]in the villages of Sevastopol,” he noted.

Why so expensive?

The expert has not observed demand for expensive real estate for a long time. Today, for objective reasons, the demand for real estate in Sevastopol as a whole has decreased – even “serious purchases up to 30 million rubles” practically do not happen.

In addition, real estate in Sevastopol is often greatly overvalued, says Grigory Apresov – in contrast to the Moscow region, where, with high prices and incomes of citizens, you can buy high-class real estate for less money.

According to the interlocutor, the overvaluation of real estate in Sevastopol was influenced by three factors: a sharp jump in the dollar exchange rate in 2014, reliance on wealthy visitors from the northern regions after joining Russia, and the construction of the Crimean Bridge. The latter, according to many, should have automatically raised real estate prices in the region.

“People evaluate the market very inadequately, so I think that Crimea is somewhat overvalued,” Grigory Apresov clarified.

Grigory Apresov explained the appearance of such advertisements for the sale of luxury real estate simply – either by a person’s desire to make money, or to return his senseless investment.

“Why is so much invested in the object? It happens, excuse me, that some big person gets it at the ball. And it happens that a person simply had honest money, invested it in the wrong place, and wants to return it. There are also those who invested half as much, but want to make money on it. That is, there are many different reasons why people put a house up for sale, even a luxurious one, for 300 million,” the expert shared his knowledge.

Uninhibited South Coast

True, this situation concerns only Sevastopol. On the neighboring southern coast of Crimea there are more multimillion-dollar transactions, and people part with money more easily.

“It’s true that there are such transactions on the South Coast, people are inclined to them, they are still being carried out there. This property is not for ordinary people, but for the elite. There the neighbor looks at the neighbor, and he also needs this. But there the tourist season is both winter and summer, because the situation with air raids is calmer there,” Natalya Massalskaya explained the regional differences.

However, the expert did not rule out the prospect of selling luxury real estate in Sevastopol. The main thing is to build your marketing correctly and select the tools. But this is a very costly matter and the customer must pay for it.

“Good marketing and a beautiful, smart advertising campaign with the right videos and targeting so that it is visible in all corners of the Earth can work. Maybe someone somewhere would have taken the bait on this advertisement. But this should be a special, expensive advertisement, and not just a line, for example, on Avito,” Natalya Massalskaya is convinced.

Polina Laskova

Photo generated by the fusionbrain.ai neural network, screenshots from the Avito website