The sale of apartments in Novi Sad has stopped, but real estate prices are not falling

The sale of apartments in Novi Sad has stopped, but real estate prices are not falling. Real estate agents see the reason for this failure of sales on the market in high interest rates. "The interest rate was six percent and regardless of the fact that 1/3 of the apartments are bought on credit and the rest for cash, without that first sale, without that nobody's money, that chain was broken.

On the other hand, apartments that come up for sale still retain a high price. When an ordinary person sells an apartment, he expects the price to rise, so instead of 2,000 euros per square meter, he advertises 2,200 or 2,300, so that he can more comfortably buy further. With investors, the prices of apartments under construction have not fallen because they still have their own money, do not borrow from banks and have no need to lower the price," said Saša Kragulj, a real estate dealer. Thus, in Novi Sad, a one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment of up to forty square meters, in an even better location, costs 100,000 euros. Kragulj points out that the situation in this city is specific, because at one point there was too much construction.

According to data from the Real Estate Prices portal, a square meter of new construction in May cost 1,670 euros, which is 2 percent cheaper than in April, but also 7.5 percent more expensive than in the same month last year. The price of the old building is 1,870 euros per square meter, which is 15.5 percent more than in May 2022.

In May, according to data from this page, 273 apartments were sold; 87 in new construction and 191 in old construction, which is almost 45 percent less than in the same period last year when almost 500 apartments were sold.

When we look at the first quarter of this year, the average price per square meter of all apartments in Novi Sad was 1,865 euros, which is an increase of more than 6 percent compared to the last quarter of 2022, but even 22 percent compared to the first quarter of last year.

On the other hand, 876 apartments were sold, which is almost 40 percent less when we look at the last quarter of last year, when 1,440 were sold.

"I don't believe that apartment prices will fall, they have no reason to." Everything has become more expensive, from locations to labor, and that keeps prices up. It is certain that the reduced construction that we expect will equalize supply and demand", adds Kragulj.

People from Russia, as Kragulj says, buy apartments by percentage, maybe one percent of them. But they still mostly rent apartments, because they came unexpectedly and took the first thing that was offered.
The rental market

In Novi Sad, you cannot rent an apartment anywhere for less than 150 euros. A two-room, new and modernly furnished apartment can still be rented for 500 euros.

"Now is the time of year when apartments are empty, students leave and wait for new ones. As sales have stopped, part of the people who planned to buy an apartment will now have to rent it, so the pressure will increase there as well. The rental price in Novi Sad was actually raised the most by the IT sector. "They are excellent payers, they prefer both old and new, there are a lot of them and their inflow is constant," said Kragulj.

According to the latest data from RGZ, there are a total of 193,620 apartments in the territory of Novi Sad, of which more than 27,500 are temporarily uninhabited, and slightly more than 1,000 apartments are abandoned. Compared to the last census from 2011, there are 33,000 more housing units in Novi Sad today, reports poslovni.hr.

Tržište nekretnine, 14. Jun. 2023.