Sellers of secondary housing are usually out of touch with reality, Stanislav Kosilov, head of analysis at Avito Real Estate, said at the Movement forum. The prices in the ads are above the market prices. When an ordinary owner decides to sell an apartment, he finds ads on the Internet about the sale of similar apartments in his or a neighboring building. He sees that his neighbor is selling his apartment for 10 million rubles, Kosilov gave an example. And he decides: I will add another 1-2 million to the price, because I have a better renovation, a better view from the window and better neighbors. At the same time, he does not take into account that the neighbor has been selling the apartment for a year and has not found a buyer, the expert emphasized. The situation in this regard is getting worse: sellers are increasingly inflating prices in relation to how professionals evaluate such properties. For example, in Moscow, the difference between the market value of a professionally manufactured object and the value stated by the seller in the advertisement increased by 6.8 percentage points over the year (from March 2023 to March 2024). “According to the results of the second quarter of 2024, the average price for which sellers of secondary real estate across the country wanted to sell the property turned out to be 10% higher than the actual cost of the transaction,” Kosilov said. For Moscow, a difference of 7-10% is a huge amount, he added.
In general, overpricing by the owner of a second apartment on the market is a common occurrence, says Ruslan Syrtsov, general director of Metrium. Owners who do not turn to realtors almost always try, for various reasons (including purely psychological ones), to sell the property at a price higher than the average price of similar apartments. Usually this “margin” reaches 20%, but there may be more expensive apartments on the market. “Over the past year, according to our observations, the percentage of overpricing has not changed significantly. Owners announce the price and wait for buyers,” says Syrtsov. “Potential customers, on the other hand, are also in no hurry to negotiate: they choose several objects that interest them and monitor the price development. The owner of an overpriced apartment does not observe the activity of potential customers and gradually begins to reduce the price until the market equilibrium level is reached and a transaction occurs.”
A discount on resale real estate is a value that increases during difficult market periods, and when there is a shortage of supply, it occurs only in exceptional cases (for example, if it is an urgent sale or the apartment has serious defects of various guys). ), says the founder of BEST-Novostroy and bnMAP .pro Irina Dobrokhotova. The pricing mechanism in the secondary market differs from the primary market. The developer has loan obligations with the bank as part of the financing of the project, the price of which cannot fall below a certain level. A large number of consulting, analysis and marketing specialists research the market and quickly detect changes to manage the price and, with their help, secure sales. In the secondary market, especially when sold independently, the owner does not have these resources and in most cases evaluates the apartment using the comparative method: opens aggregators, looks at how much similar apartments in the same location cost and fixes the price. Also often included is the emotional factor (when it seems that your favorite apartment should cost more than its analogues), an incorrect assessment of repairs and an attempt to add their cost to the price of the apartment. Therefore, apartments on the secondary market are often overpriced. “In a situation where demand is not very high due to expensive mortgages, the presence of a large number of competitive offers on the primary or secondary market, or a combination of these factors, it is extremely difficult to sell overpriced apartments, usually in such. In these cases, during negotiations, the seller, if he really intends to sell the apartment, is ready to look for a discount,” says Dobrokhotova. Now sellers of secondary properties are quite inert, she points out. Many expect that once preferential mortgages for new buildings are concluded, buyers will turn to secondary apartments. However, the reversal in demand for secondary homes is not facilitated by the very high mortgage rate within the framework of programs without subsidies: between 18 and 20%, says the expert. In some cases there are discounts of up to 10%, but this is not a system, but rather rare cases caused precisely by the circumstances of the seller or the objective condition of the apartment. In most cases, according to her, the negotiation does not exceed 3-4%.
