No rush. In Lviv, people have never heard that Kyiv residents are scooping up apartments in city

Author

Lesia Solovchuk

Realtors denied the information about the mass relocation of Kyiv residents to Lviv and the rush buying of apartments due to the possible external aggression from Russia.

Despite the fact that there is information in the media that the residents of Kyiv and Kharkiv are massively buying up housing in Lviv, an increase in sales in the city over the past month has not yet been observed.

Apartments in Lviv: No "freebee" prices

As Andriy Borysov, Chairperson of the Lviv regional branch of the Association of Real Estate Specialists (Realtors) of Ukraine (ARESU), notes in a commentary to , there is no mass buying of housing. The specialist explains this primarily by high housing prices in the city: one can buy a new finished apartment from $1,700 per 1 sq.m. According to the ARESU, although prices in Lviv are inferior to those in Kyiv, the cost of apartments remains quite high.

There are no "freebee" prices in Lviv. The cheapest option of a new apartment is $1,100-1,200 per 1 sq.m, but this is a shell & core apartment, and you need to invest another $400 per meter in it. Ready-to-live-in new apartments now cost from $1,500-1,700 per square meter. The average price of a square meter in the secondary market is approximately $1,000 as well. The number of people from Kyiv and other cities who can buy finished apartments is quite small," the expert notes.

Secondly, according to him, it can be assumed that Kyiv residents, who have an extra apartment in Pecherskyi District, can really sell it and buy two apartments in a comfort-class new building in Lviv for these funds. However, statistics do not yet show any significant deviations in the number of transactions in the market.

Commenting on the recorded slight increase in prices in the primary market on February 1, Andriy Borysov attributeы this to the inertia of the apartment price rise last year, high demand for new buildings, as well as an increase in the cost of building materials.

Rental rates go up in the off season

In contrast to sales, the rental market in Lviv revived in January: the number of transactions increased by 7% compared to December 2021, which is not typical for a lazy first month of the year.

According to Borysov, the most popular are newly commissioned new buildings where the first redecoration has already been made.

"This segment — redecorated apartments in the primary market — has seen consistently high demand in recent years, respectively, their prices for them are above average — from 9,000 UAH to 15,000 UAH per month," the expert notes.

The revival in the rental market is recorded by other real estate specialists as well. According to realtor Iryna Kovtun, most experts in the city note an increase in the number of requests for rental housing, but this does not lead to a significant increase in transactions.

"There are no statistics on the mass relocation of residents of other cities. Regarding calls to the agencies, in our opinion, people call and find out rental rates in order to be proactive," the expert explains.

According to her, rental rates in Lviv remain stable at the moment: