The Bank of Russia, the country's central bank, has now raised rates by 7.5 percentage points since July
Holy crap, 7.5% in (basically) 1 quarter. Imagine trying to buy a house and having your loan repayment amount jumping faster than you can get paperwork filed.
So your comment made me go "lol, imagine buying a house in Russia." Meaning my preconceptions were that most in Russia didn't have the means to own a home.
But then I'm like, I don't actually know that, let's check it out.
According to this site home ownership in Russia is over 90%. So what you outlined is a real problem for people there, and changes some of my mental picture of Russian life.
I was wondering the same thing for Germany, our population is stagnating, but apparently we need 400,000 new apartments per year (according to our government). Maybe because there are more divorces and singles nowadays who want to live alone?
Germany's population has actually increased by almost four million in the past ten years, so that number of new apartments seems pretty reasonable at the moment. There will always be some homes that need replaced each year too, if they become unsuitable for living or are converted to non-residential purposes
You are right, maybe the y-axis of the diagram I remember was scaled for a larger range and it looked like it was stagnating, but with those numbers it really seems reasonable.
The numbers for Germany do often look weird after reuinification. In 2011 Germany realised it actually had 1.5 million fewer people than it thought it did. It hadn't actually done a full census since reunification, and over 24 years in the west and 30 years in the east plus the difficulty of combining the two sets of records, errors built up
Yep. If more people were shaking up together. It would reduce the pressure on housing. Though I would suspect that people owning multiple houses might also have an impact on this number.
I was surprised as well. It would be worth confirming the dates from a second source, but there are some ready possible explanations for it as well. It could show a large number of multigenerational households. It could relate to the distribution of the population in high and low cost areas (rural vs urban likely). So it does seem high, but not impossible.
Another large factor is that it was communism up until relatively recently. Meaning wealth was largely evenly distributed outside the very top of the party. Not that people were well off, but far more equal than we are in the west. And while the oligarchs have an extremely outsized percentage of all Russian wealth buying real estate would make little sense in Russia, that would 1) put their position in Russia in danger by painting a target on them 2) a horrible hedge given Russia isn't the most stable economy. In total I think 90% sounds extremely reasonable. Though the average house standard is of course far lower than say Germany.
That seems reasonable. I also think it stems from my idea of ownership being a standalone house, and didn't include things like owned apartments, flats, condos, etc that would make up a large state of ownership in big cities.
It's complicated by the fact a lot of flats were privatized after the fall of USSR. It's like a boomer situation in the US. Many still live in what their parents claimed.
Hold on, 90%? I guess that would include the whole family in the home as the home owners, because otherwise that is an insane amount of single occupant dwellings.
I wasn't talking about variable rate loans. I mean by the time you started the process of getting the loan there'd be one interest rate and one expected repayment amount; and by the time you got to signing and locking in the rate it would probably have gone up by about a point and half at that rate.
Oh yeah for sure. Gotcha. Yeah I bought a house a year ago, and the rate was 5.5% when I started looking. Went up to 6% by the time I found the house and locked it in. That half percent actually represented a lot of money.
The Bank of Russia (back when things were so bad they had to halt their stock market) has also forbid people for using more than small amounts of foreign currency. I believe people are limited to the equivalent of 10,000 rubles, or $100 per week.