Chekunkov announced the growth of house construction in the Far East with preferential mortgages

The Far East and Arctic Mortgage program has spurred developers in the region, and the volume of housing construction has tripled in response to high demand. Alexei Chekunkov, Minister for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, told Izvestia in an interview on December 27.

He noted that the demand for housing in the Far East was high, but the number of projects under construction was small. Either there was spot development and low supply with high demand, according to the laws of economics, led to an increase in apartment prices. The introduction of preferential housing loans helped increase supply and housing prices fell.

"The volume of housing construction in the Far East has tripled - supply has increased and prices have cooled down. The average price in the Far East has fallen below the average Russian price. This has never happened before, because it is simply more expensive to build there," Chekunkov noted.

He pointed out that new neighborhoods are being built in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Severny microdistrict, Magadan and Gorokhovoye Pole, where almost no new houses have been commissioned at all since the Soviet times. Now, on the contrary, 7.5 million square meters of housing is being built in the macro-region. New neighborhoods are also being created, for example, the first such part of Sputnik, a future suburb of Vladivostok, has been built.

Chekunkov noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin, when instructing to launch the Far Eastern mortgage program, understood how strategically important such regions as the Far East and the Arctic are. Thanks to this program of preferential lending, more than 130 thousand families were able to buy a new apartment, which means that the regional construction industry was able to attract more than 640 billion rubles of additional funding. A third of these loans will be taken by people in 2024.

The head of the Ministry for Development of the Far East drew attention to the fact that the "Far Eastern Mortgage" expanded the categories of citizens who are eligible for it: doctors, teachers, employees of defense industrial complex enterprises (DIC) and participants of the FMS without age restrictions were added to young families up to 35 years old. Chekunkov noted that we need to work only on the limit of the mortgage: previously its limit was 6 million rubles, and now - 9 million. The Minister believes that this bar should be adjusted for inflation, so that people could buy as many square meters of housing as before.

Earlier, on November 22, Putin instructed to keep the rate of 2% under the program "Far Eastern and Arctic Mortgage" until 2030 and to extend its effect to cultural workers who moved to the Far Eastern Federal District (FEFD).

Before that, on October 22, the Russian government allocated 446.9 billion rubles for additional interest rate subsidies under the programs "Family Mortgage", "Far Eastern and Arctic Mortgage", as well as "Preferential Mortgage" from the Reserve Fund. RUB 35.1 billion of these funds were allocated for Far Eastern mortgages.