Real estate market: Sales are falling, will the price finally fall?

According to official data, the real estate market fell by about 15 percent. However, as real estate agent Kaća Lazarevic told "Vreme" earlier, that drop is much greater and goes up to 30 percent.

Buyers are most interested in how the prices of square meters will move in the next year.

As many as 59 percent of people from real estate agencies believe that prices will stagnate, and 37 percent believe that they will fall. Investors in residential construction say differently, 94 percent of them that prices will stagnate and 6 percent that they will fall.

This was shown by a survey conducted by the specialized real estate advertising site 4zida among owners and employees of 85 agencies and among 19 investors.

Both of them believe that economic instability in the country and the world represents the biggest challenge in business, followed by credit conditions and inflation, while investors are also concerned about the lack of labor.

New construction keeps the price

Although we have a drop in turnover, Lazarevic does not expect any significant price changes. According to her opinion, new buildings will keep the price, while, when it comes to old buildings, minimal corrections can be expected.

"Interest in apartments decreased from quarter to quarter. There was a significant price correction in the old building. "However, even though the new construction does not have a lot of traffic, it has not adjusted its prices because the investors believe that they have invested a lot in the construction of these properties and that they have no interest in lowering prices for now," she told "time".

"We have a very small number of credit buyers who previously participated significantly in the purchase of apartments. Now they have disappeared, so to speak," Lazarevic added.

Nevertheless, the majority of surveyed agencies and investors believe that their revenues will remain at the same level this year or will increase.

How will rents move?

After the pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine, which in the previous three years had a significant impact on the movement of prices on the real estate market, the new war in the Middle East represents a new challenge in this sector as well.

More than half of the agencies (51 percent) answered that they do not know whether the new war in the Middle East will affect the real estate market in Serbia in the coming year, while the percentage of investors who cannot predict what will happen is around 74 percent.

"Around 15 percent of agencies that believe that the new conflict will affect the domestic market state that every crisis and war causes customers to worry about the future, who then hesitate to start investing," says Aleksandra Mihajlović, PR manager of 4zida.

When it comes to the projection of apartment rental prices in Belgrade and other major cities in Serbia, for the next year, most agencies (64 percent) believe that rent prices will stagnate, 26 percent that they will decrease, while 10 percent think that prices will rise.