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Selling to Russians News: Marketing to Russian Buyers
February 20, 2010

Hi Everyone,

Are you wondering about the competition you might experience while marketing your real estate properties to buyers in Russia? You are not alone. Russian cash buyers are highly sought after and many realtors and developers from many countries are marketing their properties in Russian.

Let's try to approximately evaluate a demand-to-supply ratio for real estate properties from various countries marketed in Russian. Please keep in mind that it'll be just an example of a quick general evaluation for several countries only.

If you need more detailed research on how your particular country, region and type of real estate properties are represented in Russian, to know what to do to go ahead of your competition in search of Russian buyers, please email me.

Prian, a Russian real estate portal for foreign properties with high traffic, publishes periodic reports on the number of Russian portal visitors searching for properties in various countries. For our goal of approximate evaluation we'll consider these numbers as demand for properties in these countries from Russian buyers.

During 2009 these top six countries were in demand from Russian buyers:

1. Bulgaria – 19% of portal visitors searched for properties there over the year

2. Germany – 8%

3. Spain – 7.5%

4. Finland – 6.5%

5. USA – 6.5%

6. Italy - 5%

Now there are 10,000+ real estate properties represented on the portal from all over the world (if it's a developer with many properties behind his ad, we count it as one property anyway here, to make it easier, so the actual number of listings is higher). For our goal of approximate evaluation we'll consider the percentage of these countries listed real estate properties as supply.

The recent supply from the same countries is as follows:

1. Bulgaria – 22% of listings come from there (++)

2. Spain – 11.5% (++)

3. Italy – 6.5% (+)

4. Germany – 6% (-)

5. Finland – 5% (-)

6. USA – 2% (--)

So, from our approximate evaluation we can come to the conclusion that real estate properties from Italy are a bit oversupplied in Russian, and Bulgaria and Spain are highly oversupplied comparing to demand; while Finland and Germany are a bit undersupplied and the USA is highly undersupplied comparing to demand.

What does it all mean? If your country is undersupplied, you might end up spending less for promoting your properties in Russian to get buyers from over there. If your country is oversupplied in Russian, you might expect to market more aggressively to get Russian buyers.

Of course, it's just a general quick snapshot for only a few countries. If you need more thorough evaluation of your particular Russian marketing efforts for your particular international properties, please email me.

To your best business success,

Sincerely,

Olga Kellen,
"Anything Russian",
English - Russian Translator,
Associate member of ATA,
American Translators Association
www.english-and-russian.com
Author of the e-book for realtors
Selling to Russians

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