‘The sales on the existing homes market nearly halved compared to a year earlier; most people are now looking for one-room apartments, cottages, and single rooms,’ Atrium Real Estate Center’s Residential Real Estate Director Olga Zavyalova said to UrBC.

‘Ours is a fairly large company, so we are doing our best to retain our personnel (and we are talking about more than just ten or fifteen people here). Despite the current standstill, we can easily meet the minimum requirements imposed on the number of transactions, so we don’t really need to make our employees redundant.’

At the same time, Ms Zavyalova did agree that a lot of real estate agents had to quit due to difficulties in selling.

‘A lot of agents leave the market as they can’t beat the fierce competition through improving on quality of service and thus attracting more customers,’ she observed