Marat Khusnullin: ‘Today we have problems, but we must be ready for a new breakthrough’

“The financial situation will level out, and we must be ready”

The real estate issue is the most important in the development of any country. If the state is engaged in real estate, it means that it is developing, Marat Khusnullin noted at the beginning of his speech. “Of course, Russia is now going through a difficult time in terms of the cost of the Central Bank rate, taking into account the restrictions on mortgage limits, but this is all temporary, we will definitely survive this,” he noted.

In recent years, Russia has seen a noticeable increase in housing construction, 568 million square meters of real estate have been commissioned in five years. At the same time, it is important not only to maintain a high rate of delivery of houses, but also to provide them with the necessary engineering, transport and social infrastructure. The new national project Infrastructure for Life meets these goals. Now, according to the deputy prime minister, the country is moving from point development to comprehensive development of territories, which should cover both large agglomerations and small towns.

The speaker separately focused on the issue of reducing the investment and construction cycle by almost half. Today, on average, 1,250 days pass from the idea to the delivery of a facility, although in 2019 it was 2,181 days. The number of necessary documents, materials and approvals has decreased from 1,168 to 600. However, now the task is to reduce the investment and construction cycle to a thousand days by 2030, and the number of documents to 350.

“This is the task that we are working on very seriously, especially developers. Do you understand how many unregulated procedures there are, how high the dependence on laws, the actions of regional and municipal authorities is?! But these are investments, especially investments in real estate, they are long-term and do not tolerate short-term effects,” emphasized Marat Khusnullin, “Today we have problems, but it's okay, we must prepare — develop urban development and planning documentation. Then the financial situation will level out, and we must be ready for a new breakthrough and a new start.”

Therefore, now we need to work on reducing construction times and attracting as many funds as possible to the real estate economy, he noted.

“It's not easy to build high-rise buildings”

The topic of the country's “enormous urban development potential” was continued by Deputy Minister of Construction and Housing and Public Utilities of Russia Nikita Stasishin. Large areas are allocated for the construction of multi-apartment housing — 430 million square metres. Permits have been issued for the construction of another 170 million square meters of real estate, and about 119 million square metres of housing are being built with the involvement of citizens' funds.

“The main task is the rhythm of financing the industry, and not a change in the project financing model due to a decrease in sales rates. You understand perfectly well that market mortgages are practically unavailable today, the rates are prohibitive — 25-27%, unaffordable for citizens. At the request of the president, a number of special mortgage programs have been created,” said the deputy head of the Ministry of Construction of the Russian Federation, listing all types of preferential mortgages.

At the same time, he admitted that the number of families to whom these state programs are available differs many times from the number of families who are ready to improve their housing conditions through the mortgage mechanism. Therefore, we will have to work to ensure that the volume of housing commissioning does not decrease — 100 million square metres per year and more. “We are coping with this for now. As of 1 May, our commissioning is + 5.6% compared to the same period last year. This is about 34.6 million square metrуs of housing, half of which is individual housing construction.” Stasishin recalled that since 1 March, the escrow mechanism was introduced into the sphere of individual housing construction, for which all preferential mortgage programs are also provided. But the main thing here is to provide land plots for individual housing construction with the necessary engineering infrastructure, he noted.

Separately, the deputy minister focused on the results of work in other areas: resettlement of emergency housing, formation of a comfortable urban environment, modernization of public utilities infrastructure, development of master plans for cities. “This is no longer just about the economics of city development, but also about reducing the administrative procedures that Marat Khusnullin spoke about. Types of permitted use of land plots, number of storeys, building density in order to more effectively renovate cities within their historical boundaries. Not just build high-rise buildings, but create a truly new level of comfortable living for our citizens,” he concluded.

Not chasing image, but creating a comfortable living environment

Several other speakers shared their developments in the field of CRT. Foreign guests told how to transform the territory in order to improve the quality of life of the population and stimulate economic growth. Ali Alrauf, an architect, urbanist from Qatar, a member of the board of the International Society of Urban Planners, called not to chase image, but to create a truly comfortable living environment. According to him, each city has its own soul and rich history, so it is important to be inspired by its heritage, and not to copy someone else's urban development experience.

Emin Agalarov, Chairman of the Board of the Azerbaijan-Russia Business Council and President of Agalarov Development, presented the Sea Breeze city project. This is a growing resort city on the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan. In almost 20 years, about 25 projects with a thousand apartments have been implemented here. The city combines tourism infrastructure and real estate for living and investment, has several quarters with hotels, residential complexes, villas, apart-hotels and tourist facilities. Today, its territory is 1.5 million square metres of housing and more than 12,000 residents.

“We see about 30% of the increase in tourist flow from Russia. Last year, Azerbaijan received about 2.7 million tourists, of which about 800,000 people were from Russia. This year, we assume that there will be 30% more and this number will grow annually, because the project that I am now presenting is a three-hour flight from Moscow and there are direct flights from many other cities in Russia,” Agalarov said.

Alexander Lukyanov, CEO of Dom.RF Technologies LLC, spoke about new technologies in construction, including those based on AI. One of them is innovative modeling, which has become mandatory for facilities built under government orders since 2022, and for all facilities since 2024. This technology is already used in their work by 38 percent of developers. “We hope that in the future this will become the norm. What is important here is to increase the transparency and efficiency of construction, reduce manual input errors,” he explained.

“The city and regional authorities know better which projects to invest in.”

Krasnodar developer Nikolai Amosov, owner of the Tochno Group of Companies, presenting the activities of his company in eight regions, including Tatarstan, also noted that all projects are being implemented as part of the integrated development of territories. “We build schools, kindergartens, clinics, fitness centres, various sections for wrestling, boxing, football and so on ourselves. Of course, we pay a lot of attention to green areas, we build parks, alleys, monuments, temples,” he said and added that he considers one of the key values in construction to be respect for people, the city and traditions. After which he presented the group’s second Tatarstan project — Kaderle residential area, where the potential volume of residential development can be 2.3 million square meters.

Judging by the video, it is planned to create up to 9,000 jobs, open eight kindergartens and four schools here. However, the developer turned to the Deputy Head of the Ministry of Construction of Russia with a request to support the mega-project in Kazan:

“I would like to ask, Mr Amosov. It is difficult for businesses to implement such projects together with municipal authorities and even with regional ones. I believe that here, of course, we need support from the federal government, because there are issues with transport and network infrastructure. The project is large, and we want to implement it as part of the integrated development of the territory. I would like to ask you to pay attention and support.”

“You know, this is the specificity of the region, you come to any other region, not to Tatarstan and my beloved city of Kazan. They tell me: if it is the regional government — yes, and, probably, then the municipal one. Look what the developer said: the municipal government and maybe even the regional government,” Stasishin laughed. “What should I answer you? Of course, we will help all large projects.”

True, he promised help taking into account the opinion of the city and republic leadership: “If the city and regional authorities believe that such a project should be helped. Here, everything is quite simple and clear for us. The project is a priority, colleagues know how to work with all the tools to support social, transport, and engineering infrastructure. We will help, but if the regional and municipal authorities do not think so, then we will not. They definitely know better than us what projects they need to invest federal, regional, municipal, and private money in.”