Prices for new buildings in Russia increased by 10.6% over the year

In some of Russia's largest cities, the average cost per square meter in the primary housing market has increased by more than 15%. This was reported to Izvestia on January 18 by the federal company Floors.

"Last year was difficult and ambiguous for Russian developers. In the first half of the year, they faced a shortage of demand and there was even a trend towards reducing the launch of new projects on the market, but the reduction in the Central Bank's key rate and the announcement of new changes to family mortgages led to a sharp increase in demand for apartments since autumn and new records for the price per square meter," commented the sales director of the federal company on the real estate marketFloors" by Sergey Zaitsev.

Analysts of the company "Floors" presented a rating of Russian million-plus cities based on the annual increase in the average price per square meter. Chelyabinsk came in first place, where it grew by 20.4%, Omsk came in second (+16.1%), Nizhny Novgorod came in third (+15.3%), Kazan came in fourth (+15.2%) and Novosibirsk came in fifth (+15%). Moscow (+14.9%), Voronezh (+14.5%), Perm (+14.2%), Volgograd (+10.9%) and Yekaterinburg (+10.7%) are also in the top ten. In other metropolitan areas, the increase in the average price per square meter in housing under construction did not exceed 10%. So, in Krasnodar it was only 8.4%, in St. Petersburg - 7%, Ufa — 6.7%, Krasnoyarsk — 4.7%, Rostov-on-Don — 3.3%. The most insignificant increase was recorded in Samara — only 1.9%.

"Developers are forced to include inflationary risks for the entire construction period in the cost per square meter, as well as higher loan servicing costs in case they fail to realize the number of apartments necessary to fill escrow accounts," Zaitsev added.

According to him, another factor in the growth of the average price per square meter of housing under construction is the tendency for developers to switch from building typical housing with low profitability and risks of lack of demand to implementing comfort-class projects in which costs, and hence the final price, are higher.

"In 2026, there are no obvious catalysts for the growth of the cost per square meter in the primary housing market. The restriction of family mortgages leads to a gradual cooling of demand, so price surprises are unlikely to be expected — the cost of housing will continue to rise within the limits of inflation," the expert concluded.

Construction noise: how new buildings and secondary buildings have risen in price in 2025

The market is faced with inflation, which increases the cost of housing, and the consequences of prohibitive mortgage rates

The demand for small business class apartments has increased 1.8 times. This is the conclusion reached by analysts at STONE, who traced the evolution of demand for apartments up to 40 square meters. From 2020 to 2025, we found out how Muscovites' preferences for such housing have changed in the business and comfort class market. On January 15, Izvestia got acquainted with the results of the conducted research. According to the preliminary results of the year, the business class segment showed the strongest growth in interest in small-sized apartments (up to 40 square meters). Since the end of summer, the dynamics of transactions has significantly outpaced last year's figures. If demand was unstable in the first half of 2025, then in August the increase compared to August 2024 was 76%.

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