Dubravko Ranilović, president of the Real Estate Association at the Croatian Chamber of Commerce and owner of a real estate agency, notes that an entire location was damaged by the market.

"What is the problem of the city of Zagreb or the Lower City is in any case that earthquake, and then de facto not only individual apartments were destroyed, because people do not look at individual apartments, but the entire location was destroyed on the market. So people don't segment building from building to apartment, apartment to apartment, but actually find the whole area shockingly insecure, which has some logic and reasons, considering that in the next few years the city center will be a construction site, so it's full of silence and dust. " , he notes.

In Zagreb, construction is currently underway in almost the entire city, wherever there is adequate land, and the price of new construction, depending on the location, ranges from 3,000 to as much as 8,000 euros per square meter.

"As far as Croatia itself is concerned, the real estate market has been affected by earthquakes and tourism development in the last year. These are some peculiarities of the Croatian market, and the growth of real estate prices is definitely influenced by two factors: external - let's say an increase in construction prices, an increase in material prices in the production of newly built real estate and another that is still low interest, very relatively cheap money and low interest rates on housing loans ", Ranilović points out.

Despite the high prices, we are looking for settlements that are shockingly safer, have adequately built infrastructure, enough green space, but also a sufficient number of parking spaces.

"Zagreb is a big expansion, more than 50,000 apartments are missing and automatically people want to build as much as possible, which can be seen, where once there was a green area, now buildings are sprouting along the road, so the demand is great, people are looking for apartments, and now they want security too. They just don't want to go where the elite neighborhood used to be, that's my personal opinion because they are afraid of what will happen again if there is another earthquake ", says Filip Matija Čačić, a real estate expert.

However, there are several criteria for purchase.

"You have the criterion that someone will invest something, so they will put it on the market for rent. For some time, it was a criterion to buy the best possible location for tourist rental in the city of Zagreb, which did not happen due to the pandemic. Life criteria, some start-up apartments because the psychological barrier is some one hundred to one hundred and twenty thousand euros. The most sought-after are apartments from one hundred to one hundred and twenty thousand euros, one-bedroom and one-and-a-half-bedroom, because that simply determines the material status ", says Ranilović.

However, the price of square meters is also rising in old buildings, which is influenced by state subsidies for housing loans. Apartment owners are raising real estate prices ahead of the announcement of APN's public tenders because demand is growing.

"According to us, the biggest problems with subsidies were two. One is that you had to be creditworthy, and those categories we wanted to subsidize were creditworthy. So the question was whether, through subsidies, apartments were bought by people who thought of buying an apartment anyway. That's one thing. Then, to make it easier, it was a softer entry into a loan for a young man, so the loan is lower for those five years, but as soon as you have a maturity and subsidies have deadlines, the price of real estate rises for a certain period due to demand. That is inevitable.

It is a way of some active sale, if there is a deadline, the demand increases in a shorter period and the price of real estate rises. And of course that was a negative aspect of subsidies and we pointed that out and I hope that, and if some subsidies will be used, they will be in another form. We as a profession had some ideas, we have to go in the right direction and see the consequences that go.

Interventions on the market often do not end well for the users of the subsidy, because in the end he may have entered the real estate softer, but the salaries are a bit more expensive ", notes Ranilović.

Real estate prices in the future will also depend on the quality implementation of the renovation.

Source: Seebiy.hr and Dnevnik.hr