Experts reported an increase in demand for trade-in when buying a home

The trade-in program in the business and premium class segments is no longer a rare tool and is gradually becoming a familiar scenario for buying real estate. Almost every fifth buyer considers the exchange of an existing apartment for a new one with an additional payment as a priority option. This is evidenced by the research of the Mangazeya development company, which was reviewed on March 13 by Izvestia.

According to the survey results, 19.4% of respondents call trade-in the main way to improve housing conditions. Another 47.2% are ready to use such a mechanism if there are favorable offers. At the same time, only 5.6% of respondents plan to sell an apartment on their own, and 27.8% have not yet considered such a transaction format.

The growth of interest is also confirmed by market statistics. Over the past year, the number of transactions under the trade-in program has increased by about 15%. At the same time, the process itself has become much faster: if previously it took up to several months, now the registration can take only two to three weeks. At the same time, the difference between the initial price of the apartment and the actual value of the transaction decreased from about 2 million to 500 thousand rubles.

As Yulia Arkhangelskaya, head of the commercial services department at the Mangazeya development company, explained, the main audience of the program remains buyers who already live in comfort-plus or business-lite homes and seek to improve living conditions without a long-term independent sale of housing.

According to her, apartments built in the early and mid-2000s or early 2010s are most often offered for exchange. Such houses remain habitable, but they no longer fully meet the expectations of buyers with increased incomes. At the same time, transactions with apartments from old "Luzhkov" houses of the late 1990s and early 2000s or with ancestral housing are becoming less common.

"Regardless of the type of housing, the requirements for the transferred apartments remain universal: the object must be liquid, suitable for quick sale and accepted by banks as collateral. This means that when buying premium real estate, the previous apartment does not necessarily have to match the same level," said Arkhangelskaya.

Apartment spread: the price of new buildings has increased since the beginning of the year in all major cities

Most of all, the "square" rose in price in Moscow, Kazan, Perm, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg.

For most buyers, the sale of existing housing becomes a key source of financing for a new apartment. About a third of clients expect to cover 50-70% of the cost of a new facility through trade-in, and about the same amount — more than 70%. The remaining 30% of buyers have more moderate expectations: they expect to close up to half the cost of a new apartment by selling their former homes.

Experts also note the expansion of the geography of such transactions. In recent months, the share of customers from other regions has been growing, primarily from cities with millions of residents, including Krasnodar, St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod, as well as from satellite cities near Moscow. Trade-in is often used for inter-regional exchange: buyers sell housing in another city in order to purchase an apartment in Moscow.

Among the key advantages of the program, buyers cite the opportunity to continue living in an old apartment until the completion of a new house — this factor is important for 30.6% of respondents. For 27.8%, the priority is to reduce the risks of the transaction, for 25% — fixing the price of a new apartment, and 13.9% focus on guaranteed terms of sale of housing. The size of the discount to the market value is important only for 2.8% of the respondents.

According to Arkhangelskaya, today more and more buyers are using trade-in at the early stages of construction. This is due to the fact that the difference in price between the excavation and the finished house allows you to reduce the final purchase price. In the future, the development of the program, according to experts, will be associated with the simplification of real estate valuation procedures and the reduction of transaction processing time.

Analysts at NDV Real Estate Supermarket reported on March 4 that, by the end of February 2026, the average price per square meter in the primary housing market of "old" Moscow amounted to 814.9 thousand rubles, including the elite segment. During the month, the cost decreased by 2.3%.

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