UrBC, Yekaterinburg, January 22, 2016. It is reported preliminarily that housing sales decreased by 25% to 27% in Sverdlovsk Region last year, the constituency’s Construction & Infrastructure Development Minister Sergei Bidonko said at a press conference.

‘As the customers’ paying capacity deteriorated, sales dropped. Given last year’s economic circumstances, the initial decline was estimated at 40% but turned out to be less than this by the end of the year,’ he said.

In the meantime, housing prices keep going down: Bidonko said in some cased the decrease reached 12% to 17%.

Still, this year’s new housing target figures were raised to 2.25m m 2 (against 2.1m m2 target figure and the 2.438m m2 worth of housing that got actually built last year).

As it happens, the impressive new housing output remained high in the previous years mainly because of Yekaterinburg, where over 1m m2 worth of new housing got put up every year. In 2016, however, the city council thinks this figure likely to halve.