Berlin gets townhouses
Townhouses, a new architectural trend for Berlin, are spreading in the city. Five townhouse developments are either under way or recently completed, the International Herald Tribune reported. This is Berlin’s first wave of these buildings, which borrow from the style of Brooklyn brownstones and townhouses in London’s Kensington district. They are roughly 1,200 to 3,300 square feet, with frontages of around 20 feet.
These five projects are benefitting from historically cheap land in a city where families and the creative class are eager to move downtown. One developer has turned a 3.8-acre site into a neighborhood of 61 townhouse homes and 49 apartments in the hip, young district of Prenzlauer Berg. The development, called Prenzlauer Gardens, has sold all of its four-story townhouses since opening in fall 2006, at prices of around $580,000. The Gardens’ developer is planning a second, 60-townhouse project several miles away.
A similar building boom has happened in the nearby family-oriented district Mitte, where four years ago the city sold 4.2 acres to private developers in 47 parcels. The area has become a development of 54 townhouses called Berlin Townhouses, which will be completed in 2008. The houses cost $881,100 to $1.46 million. To prevent investor speculation on the properties, the government banned resale on the development’s land or buildings for 10 years from the time of initial purchase.
High-end retail boom for Moscow
A spur of retail building and refurbishment is spreading through Moscow. And while high retail rents and the strengthening ruble have raised the prices of goods, making them too expensive for many tourists, the city’s growing incomes and expanding middle class more than compensate to keep the market thriving.
Leading the continent in new shopping center space, Russia is expected to open over 1,130 acres by the end of 2008.
In Moscow’s center, new retail developments include a $120 million luxury department store and office venture by a South Korea-based developer called the Lotte Group and a 3.55 million-square-foot retail and office project, to be called Metropolis, slated to open in 2008.
Shopping destinations have popped up outside the city, too, like Barvikha Luxury Village in the suburban town of Rublyovka. Opened in 2005, the center holds Ferrari and Harley Davidson dealerships, as well as gourmet food and designer clothing.
Meanwhile, an appetite for high-end retail also prompted makeovers of Soviet-era retailers, like the department store TSUM. The store has doubled in size since 2005. TSUM’s central Moscow rival, GUM, transformed from a flea-market-like establishment in the early 1990s to a collection of tony boutique stores today.
Spain sees slow home sales, tightened credit
After skyrocketing real estate values and economic growth since 2000, Spain is seeing a slowdown in housing sales and tightened lending, viewed widely as fallout from the U.S. credit crisis. A third of the nation’s banks reduced financing in the third quarter of 2007, compared to only 4 percent in the entire euro region, although experts predict Spanish banks’ prudence will spread through the continent.
In the past seven years home values in Spain have risen by 176 percent, and construction has accounted for one in five of the country’s new jobs. But this October the International Monetary Fund cut its prediction for Spain’s 2007 growth to 2.7 percent from 3.4 percent earlier in the year.
However, many remain bullish on the country’s housing market, noting that an influx of immigration is creating new demand, and that the largest Spanish builders are insulated from a crash by recent expansions overseas.