Rental prices in Serbia have decreased by about 20% for three-room and larger apartments, and even the rent for the smallest apartments, which are in the highest demand, dropped by around 10% due to the pandemic.
There are several reasons for this, including the fact that a large number of students returned home a year ago due to classes being spent online.
What is new, however, is that these same students, for the most part, did not return to the big cities where they were studying. At the same time, there are no tourists, who often rented apartments for overnight stays. Therefore, the number of apartments in supply has increased but the demand has declined which, in turn, led to a decrease in rent prices.
Judging from the advertisements for apartment rentals in Belgrade, the average prices of studios are around 200 euro and one-bedroom apartments between 200 and 250 euro.
In Niš, for example, two-bedroom or larger apartments can be found for up to 200 euro, and the situation is similar in Novi Sad, where rental prices are certainly considerably lower than in the capital.
“Rent for three-bedroom and larger apartments has decreased by about 20%, while rents for smaller apartments decreased dramatically during the state of emergency, and now they have stabilized, but they are still 10% lower, on average,” says Anita Pesic, manager of the website Nekretnine.rs.
She adds that the drop in prices of real estate rentals was directly caused by the pandemic.
“Students are now studying online and most of them did not rent apartments. Many companies are still using remote work, which also allows their employees from abroad to work from home,” Pesic adds.
She also says that the short-term rental market has been significantly affected by the pandemic because it is directly dependent on foreign tourists, which number has drastically declined. Most apartment owners, who used to rent their apartments short-term, started renting apartments on a monthly basis, which significantly increased the supply of apartments for rent. This too contributed to the fall of rent prices.
Compared with the sharp increase in the price of real estate for sale, we realize the price of apartment rental does not follow this trend. “The increase in the price of properties for sale cannot directly affect the rental price because only 10-15% of properties are rented out. To have a direct impact, this percentage of would have to be much higher,” Pesic concludes.
(Mondo, 28.02.2021)
https://mondo.rs/Info/Drustvo/a1441324/cena-nekretnina-izdavanje-stanova-kirija-beograd.html
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