REAL ESTATE WEEK • No. 3 • OCTOBER 2 2026
For the past several years, the real estate market has revolved around one big question:
How much does money cost?
Now there is a second one.
When does the money actually arrive?
An apartment can be sold today and paid for several years later.
A building can be completed while buyers' money remains at the bank for another ten business days.
A mortgage can perform normally for years before eventually falling into arrears.
A commercial property can change hands not because an investor has spotted an exceptional opportunity, but because the previous owner needs to repay debt.
On paper, these are entirely different things.
Installment plans.
Escrow accounts.
Mortgage arrears.
Distressed transactions.
Economically, however, they have something in common.
Time has once again become part of the price of real estate.
And this week made that particularly clear.
Let's start with the figure that perhaps best describes the state of Russia's primary housing market.
In the second quarter, 25% of shared-equity construction agreements were concluded using installment plans.
At the beginning of the year, the share was around 20%.
In other words, roughly one in four new-build transactions now assumes that the buyer will not pay the full amount immediately.
For developers, this is a way to avoid losing customers when conventional mortgages are expensive.
For buyers, it offers a way to enter a transaction without taking out a bank loan at today's rates.
For the statistics, it is still a registered sale.
But a growing distance is appearing between a registered sale and a fully paid apartment.
That distance can already be measured in trillions of rubles.
That is approximately how much buyers still have to pay under existing installment agreements.
As of September 1, around 17% of active shared-equity construction agreements had not yet been fully paid.
Future payments under those contracts amount to approximately RUB 1.5 trillion.
Since the beginning of the year, the figure has increased by roughly RUB 200 billion.
It is important to understand what this number means.
It is not RUB 1.5 trillion of overdue debt.
Nor does it represent RUB 1.5 trillion of troubled apartments.
These are payments that, under already signed contracts, are scheduled to arrive later.
But the scale matters.
It shows that the sale of an apartment and the receipt of the money for that apartment are increasingly taking place at different points in time.
Previously, a bank usually stood between those two moments.
Now, increasingly, there is a calendar.
The economics are fairly straightforward.
When mortgages are expensive, buyers look for ways to avoid taking one out today.
Developers, meanwhile, look for ways to avoid cutting apartment prices today.
Installment plans allow both sides to postpone an uncomfortable conversation.
The buyer hopes that rates will fall within a year or two, allowing the remaining balance to be refinanced.
The developer records the transaction now and receives the money in stages.
The apartment's headline price can remain almost unchanged.
In effect, installment plans have become an alternative to cheap mortgages.
Previously, part of the cost of money was absorbed by the government or the bank.
Now the developer temporarily assumes part of the financial burden.
Temporarily.
That is the important word.
Because an installment plan does not eliminate the need to pay for the apartment.
It moves that obligation into the future.
It would be easy to turn these numbers into a dramatic headline about "a trillion rubles of unpaid apartments."
It would also be wrong.
So far, the statistics do not indicate a wave of cancellations involving installment purchases.
Around a third of surveyed developers reported no such cases at all.
Among the others, cancellations did not exceed 10%.
For now, therefore, installment plans are doing what they are supposed to do.
They allow some buyers to complete a transaction when a conventional mortgage looks too expensive.
But the real test of this model is still ahead.
It will come when the larger payments under existing installment agreements begin to fall due.
Then we will see how many buyers used installments as a practical financial bridge.
And how many simply moved the problem to a later date.
In real estate, several years is long enough for a great deal to change.
And short enough for the payment date to arrive anyway.
The second important figure of the week comes not from developers, but from banks.
As of September 1, overdue mortgage debt in Russia had reached RUB 263.6 billion.
In August alone, it increased by RUB 10.8 billion, or 4.3%.
Over the year, the increase was approximately 57%.
At first glance, that looks alarming.
But once again, the headline does not tell the whole story.
Russia's total mortgage portfolio stands at around RUB 24.8 trillion.
It has grown by approximately 10% over the year.
Problem debt is therefore rising much faster than the overall portfolio.
But its share remains relatively small.
This is not a mortgage crisis.
It is a signal that the consequences of a period of exceptionally rapid credit expansion are beginning to emerge.
The mortgage market has an inconvenient characteristic.
Problems rarely appear at the moment a loan is issued.
First, the borrower gets the mortgage.
Then payments are made normally for several years.
Later, income, expenses, family circumstances or refinancing conditions may change.
Only then can the loan become problematic.
That means today's arrears do not necessarily tell us about today's housing market.
They tell us about decisions made earlier.
Loans issued in 2023–2024 are particularly relevant — a period marked by widespread use of subsidized mortgages and rapid growth in new-build prices.
At the time, the central question was:
"How do I buy an apartment?"
For some borrowers, another question is gradually becoming more important:
"How do I keep paying for it?"
That is a normal part of a credit cycle.
But it deserves close attention.
Especially if arrears continue to grow much faster than the mortgage portfolio itself.
This week also brought new rules for Russia's main subsidized mortgage program.
From October 1, the Family Mortgage program stopped offering identical terms to every eligible family.
Rates now depend on the number of children and the region.
In most regions, a family with one child under seven receives a 10% rate; two children — 8%; three — 6%; four — 4%; and five or more — 2%.
Rates are higher in Moscow, the Moscow Region, St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region.
Maximum loan amounts have also changed, while the subsidy period is capped at 15 years.
There is one particularly interesting exception.
For the construction of a private house, the rate remains 6% regardless of the number of children or the region.
In other words, the government is no longer simply increasing or reducing housing support.
It is becoming more precise about which demand it wants to support most strongly.
Only a few years ago, a buyer mainly needed to know the price of an apartment and the mortgage rate.
That is no longer enough.
One family may qualify for 4%.
Another may get 10%.
A third can build a house at 6%.
A fourth may avoid a mortgage altogether and buy through an installment plan.
A fifth may wait for rates to fall and remain in the secondary market.
All of them participate in the same housing market.
But the cost of money is entirely different for each.
That makes the concept of "housing affordability" increasingly difficult to express as a single number.
It is no longer the apartment itself that is simply affordable or unaffordable. It is a particular financing structure for a particular buyer.
That is a fairly fundamental change.
And developers will have to adapt to it just as much as buyers do.
This week, Russia's Ministry of Construction proposed reducing the time banks have to transfer money to developers after escrow accounts are released.
Banks can currently take up to ten business days once the relevant conditions have been met.
The proposal would reduce that period to three business days.
At first glance, seven days may seem insignificant.
In real estate, many things look insignificant until the word "trillion" appears next to them.
In 2024, approximately RUB 4.5 trillion was transferred from escrow accounts to developers.
According to the Ministry's calculations, banks' ability to retain those funds for an additional seven business days could have generated approximately RUB 22.5 billion a year for them.
So the argument is not really about seven days.
It is about the price of seven days.
The Ministry's proposal is interesting for more than its technical details.
It fits perfectly with the broader logic of today's market.
When money is cheap, a few days of liquidity barely matter.
When money is expensive, every day acquires a price.
The developer has completed the project.
The buyer has paid.
The building has been commissioned.
But the capital remains at the bank for a little longer.
For a major developer, getting that money back sooner can mean repaying obligations earlier, reducing financing costs or putting capital into the next project.
Seven days suddenly become worthy of legislative attention.
Expensive money has an unusual quality.
It makes people calculate things they once rounded away.
Perhaps the week's most revealing story, however, is taking place outside the residential market.
During the first nine months of 2026, investment in commercial real estate and development sites totaled approximately RUB 840 billion.
Almost the same as a year earlier.
Stop there, and the investment market looks remarkably stable.
But inside those RUB 840 billion is another number.
RUB 229 billion.
Or 27.2% of total investment volume.
That amount came from distressed transactions.
Auction sales.
Asset disposals intended to repay debt.
Sales of confiscated property.
In other words, almost every third ruble entering the investment market arrived not only because someone wanted to buy.
But because someone else needed to sell.
That distinction matters.
Two markets can both report RUB 840 billion in investment.
In the first, owners sell assets because investors are offering attractive prices.
In the second, they sell because capital is expensive, debt must be serviced and the asset has become a source of liquidity.
Statistically, both transactions look the same.
Economically, they are very different.
The warehouse segment is particularly revealing.
It accounted for 66% of distressed investment.
A significant part of this was related to major transactions involving former Raven Russia assets, so it would be wrong to extrapolate that percentage across the entire warehouse market.
But the overall scale of distressed transactions can no longer be ignored.
Consultants also expect their share to remain around 30% in 2027.
This may therefore be more than an unusual quarter.
Distressed assets are becoming a visible part of the investment market.
There is another interesting detail.
Investment by private buyers in commercial real estate increased by approximately 40%, reaching RUB 191 billion.
When borrowed money is expensive, those who need less of it gain an advantage.
It is an old principle.
Expensive capital weakens the borrower.
But at the same time, it creates opportunities for buyers with their own funds.
That is why today's market cannot be described simply as "difficult" or "bad."
For one participant, a high interest rate makes it impossible to keep an asset.
For another, it creates an opportunity to buy that asset.
Real estate does not necessarily destroy capital.
Quite often, it simply changes who owns it.
At first glance, almost nothing.
Installment plans relate to apartment purchases.
Arrears relate to bank loans.
Escrow relates to construction finance.
Distressed transactions belong to the investment market.
But all four stories this week point to the same thing.
The cost of money has changed the value of time.
The buyer postpones payment.
The bank waits for payment.
The developer waits for escrow funds.
The owner of a commercial asset sometimes can no longer afford to wait and sells.
In every case, time becomes a financial variable.
That is why Russia's 2026 real estate market can no longer be analyzed only through prices per square meter.
We also need to watch how money moves between participants.
Who pays.
Whom they pay.
When they pay.
And who finances the waiting period.
This is particularly visible in new developments.
The same apartment can be sold through a Family Mortgage.
A market-rate mortgage.
A subsidized rate.
An installment plan.
A large down payment.
Or subsequent refinancing.
The apartment's headline price may barely change.
But the economics of buying it can be completely different.
Behind the polished price list there is increasingly a second document — the payment schedule.
And sometimes it tells us more about the true cost of an apartment than the price per square meter does.
First, cancellations of installment-based shared-equity agreements.
Their current level remains relatively low. If it begins to rise significantly, that will be one of the first indications that some deferred demand was financially overextended.
Second, mortgage arrears.
The absolute figure matters less than how quickly it changes relative to the overall mortgage portfolio.
Third, the market's response to the new Family Mortgage rules.
October will provide the first indication of how buyers redistribute themselves between different rates, regions, new builds and individual housing construction.
Fourth, distressed investment transactions.
If their share really remains around 30%, forced asset sales will become an independent source of commercial real estate supply.
And fifth, new project launches by developers.
Because every financial mechanism ultimately converges on one question:
Does the developer have enough money — and enough confidence — to start building the next project?
In the first issue of Russian Estate, we wrote that the real estate market was learning to live without cheap money.
In the second, we saw different parts of that market begin to diverge: buyers were returning to the secondary market while the primary market became increasingly dependent on specific financing programs.
The third week reveals the next stage.
The market has learned to buy time.
The buyer uses installments and postpones payment.
The developer records the sale today and receives the money tomorrow.
The bank holds capital in escrow for a few more days.
The investor waits for a distressed asset at an attractive price.
The owner sells because waiting has become too expensive.
All of this allows the market to keep functioning even while the cost of money remains high.
But time is not a free resource.
Every installment plan eventually reaches a payment date.
Every loan has to be serviced.
Every project reaches the moment when the next one must begin.
And every investor eventually reaches the point where waiting stops being a strategy.
So the central question facing the real estate market this autumn is gradually changing.
For long enough, we have been asking:
"When will money become cheap again?"
Now another question may be more useful:
"Who can afford to wait until it does?"
The answer may determine who owns the best assets, which projects actually get built — and who enters the next cycle from the strongest position.
Russian Estate | Real Estate Week
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