INTERVIEW
DEJAN MOLNAR, PROFESSOR AT THE BELGRADE FACULTY OF ECONOMICS
Exchange Rate Maintains Stability In Property Market Unless there are large fluctuations in the exchange rate and as long as people experience that their standard of living is rising, and while banks guided by the same logic expand their mortgage portfolios, the current trends in the real estate market will continue. The million-dollar question is: when will that connection begin to slip?
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nflation, the possibility that banks will raise the price of mortgages, the future dinar-euro ratio, people’s purchasing power and the conflict in Ukraine bringing new residents to Serbia are just some of the many elements shaping prices in the country’s property market at the moment. Will the growth of property prices that we have been seeing since 2013 and the growth in the value of approved housing loans continue, or are we facing the bursting of a ‘real estate bubble’? Professor Dejan Molnar of the Belgrade Faculty of Economics analyses these trends and possible scenarios. In Serbia, we can remember not so long ago when the demand for apartments was so low that owners were happy to find tenants at all, and that now with the story of the arrival of Russians and Ukrainians, apartment rents are said to be growing. In your opinion, what awaits current and future apartment owners and those who rent them in the next year or two? In our country, when people earn more (or feel they do), they usually decide to buy property. It is also important that rents have grown in recent years, so in conditions of low interest rates, a monthly mortgage instalment is lower than rent, which leads many to decide to take out a mortgage and start repaying their own square metres instead of renting them. Trends in the apartment rental market will above all be determined by the level of people’s living standards and their loan conditions. Expressed in euros, the 6 |
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