True North Perspective
CALGARY — Judy Drzymala of RE/MAX Real Estate Central says that as summer begins a buyer’s market has developed.
She says this is a good time for sellers too.
“Listings in the city of Calgary spiked 17 per cent during May causing a significant shift in the market,” says Ms. Drzymala.
“The average price of single-family homes was up by 2.80 per cent in May. The average sale this summer may take longer on the market because of the increase in listings.”
Ms. Dryzmala forecast stability in the market for the remainder of the year.
“I expect June will be a great month for both buyers and sellers because June is the time for families to make buying decisions before the school season starts again in September.
When you combine this with a great inventory of listings, you have promise of a very active season.”
Condos and homes under $500,00 are the most active in the marketplace right now.
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Bloomberg
WARSAW — Orco Property Group, a real estate developer that operates in Central and Eastern Europe, said Friday it would beat its full-year sales target because the initial forecast did not take into account acquisitions in Germany and Russia.
Sales may exceed the forecast by 10 percent to 15 percent, Orco vice-president Arnaud Bricout said in Warsaw on Friday. Net income will probably be much better in the second quarter than in the first three months of the year, he added.
The Luxembourg-based company bought Gewerbesiedlungs-Gesellschaft, which leases commercial property in Berlin, for 400 million euros ($536 million) on June 12 and purchased Molcom, a Russian warehouse operator, for $85 million in April.
"This was a very conservative forecast because some of the acquisitions weren't taken into account, such as the Berlin acquisition and the Russian acquisition," Bricout said.
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By Kristen Schweizer
Bloomberg
BUDAPEST — TriGranit, Hungary's biggest property company, will spend about 5 billion euros ($6.7 billion) to buy companies and develop real estate in Russia, chairman Sandor Demjan said in an interview.
TriGranit, based in Budapest, purchased a Russian company earlier this month and aims to acquire as many as nine more, Demjan said. TriGranit formed a venture with a unit of Gazprombank in January to build retail and office buildings in several cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg.
"There is huge potential and huge possibilities right now in Russia," said Demjan, 64, at his company's headquarters in downtown Budapest, next to Eastern Europe's largest shopping center. The mall was built by TriGranit in 1999.
Investment in Russian real estate increased to $4.2 billion last year, up from less than $500 million in 2005, Jones Lang LaSalle said in March. TriGranit also plans to raise more than 5 billion euros by selling shares and will list them in Moscow and London within three years, Demjan said.
Demjan is Hungary's third-richest man with a fortune of 50 billion forint ($260 million), according to a list compiled by Nepszabadsag newspaper in October. He created TriGranit in 1996 and now owns 34 percent of the shares.
Immoeast Immobilien Anlagen, an Austrian property developer, bought 25 percent of TriGranit for 400 million euros in August. Atticus Capital's Nathaniel Rothschild and Sandor Csanyi, chief executive officer of OTP Bank, together own 25 percent of the company.
"Most developers are looking at the former Soviet Union, where yields are still significantly higher" than in Central Europe, said Robert Keller, an analyst at Patria Finance in Prague.
TriGranit earlier this month bought a "medium-sized" Russian property company. Its first project in the country will be developing 200,000 square meters of space in the center of Krasnodar at a cost of about $1 billion.
The company's venture with Gazprombank's property unit will build "entire city suburbs," said Patrick Berger, an analyst at Creditanstalt Investment. "TriGranit seems to be making smart strategic decisions."
In the past 10 years, TriGranit has spent 1.5 billion euros developing real estate in Eastern Europe and will invest a total of 8 billion euros outside Russia in the next three to four years, Demjan said. Projects include a sports arena in Zagreb and shopping malls and hotels in Bucharest.
"We just have an endless supply of money right now," Demjan said. "Every day I get phone calls and am offered money from people interested in good investments."
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By Marina Kamenev
Special to The Moscow Times
A Division of The New York Times
Vladimir Filonov / MT
An external view from Leontyevsky Pereulok of the 18th- and 19th-century complex that houses Stanislavskogo 2.
In a rare success for preservation activists, an 18th-and 19th-century complex in the center of Moscow looks to be safe following a long campaign against its destruction.
Two buildings on Bolshaya Nikitskaya had their protected status restored Wednesday by the Moscow city government's preservation committee.
The move comes after a series of court cases and sustained campaigning by the owners of Stanislavskogo 2, one of the first private restaurants to appear in Moscow after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The family-run restaurant, located on the ground floor of Bolshaya Nikitskaya 26 is a favorite with foreigners, and even former President Boris Yeltsin once ate there.
The three buildings on Bolshaya Nikitskaya once comprised the city mansion of Prince Nikolai Yusupov, who more famously owned the Arkhangelskoye Estate. It was later the home for actors from a famous 19th-century theatre.
Despite the site's rich history, it was taken off the protection list by the city in 2005 and the building was declared uninhabitable and hazardous.
Plans were drawn up for one of the buildings to be knocked down and converted into luxury flats by realty developers NEO. There were fears that reconstruction work would also irrevocably damage the other buildings.
The Moscow Preservation Committee ruled Wednesday at a hearing that the buildings should go back on the protected list. Two members of the committee at the hearing said the status of the building should not be up for discussion, but they were overruled by acting head of the committee Alexander Filayev.
Emily Souptel, who runs Stanislavskogo 2 with her mother, Rosalie Korodzievskaya, was delighted with the result of the hearing.
"I am looking forward to focusing on the restaurant, changing the menu, tweaking the interior and concentrating on the customers. I feel like I have been signing paperwork and talking to lawyers forever," Souptel said after the hearing.
Korodzievskaya has cooked homemade dishes in the neatly tiled kitchen for 20 of the 38 years she has lived there. She planted trees and installed a red and yellow playground for local children in the 200-year-old courtyard.
Souptel grew up in a communal flat in the adjoining building.
"It's quite funny, there was a boy that lived in this flat who would always push me off my bike when I was little; now we are running a restaurant from his apartment," Souptel said.
Having lived and worked in the building for so long, the pair, unlike other tenants who left, decided to fight to save their home.
In 2005, NEO tried to sue Souptel and Korodzievskaya, saying that their ownership documents were invalid. The pair has won four cases against the developers so far. NEO could not be reached for comment Monday.
"I think it's great that the building will be put back on the list," said Clementine Cecil, co-founder of the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society. "It's a tribute to the dedication and stamina of these women to protect their property."
Souptel is happy that her building is now protected but nevertheless remains cautious about the future.
"It's Moscow. Unfortunately, at the right price, the building's status can change again," she said.
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