Dmitri Tereburke
Is it possible to calculate the real demand and real supply of apartments in Chisinau municipality in our conditions?
The most popular source of information about those wishing to buy or sell real estate is the portal 999.md. Someone believes that it is a mirror of the real estate market. How truthfully does this “mirror” reflect the situation on the Chisinau market?
Interviewed by Logos Press experts advised not to trust the data on advertisements to analyze the market. The executive director of the Society of Independent Appraisers of the Republic of Moldova, Dmitri Tărăburcă, unequivocally rejects this approach. “From the point of view of sampling – it is unacceptable, one apartment is repeated many times, and in different interpretations. The distortion goes already depending on who submitted the ad, prices change uncontrollably. Most often, the ads reflect more cost expectations than the real price of the offer. This difference can reach 30-40%, it is nonsense,” he says.
The “buy” announcements also do not reflect the demand, considers Dmitri Tereburke. The institution of buying is not fixed in our country, no one works with buyers. No one has a real buyer, these ads are just speculation. “Very rarely a person who is looking for an apartment will flaunt the availability of money or opportunities. There is no sense in this, because there is enough open information about sales, who is not satisfied with it, looking for options through acquaintances. For me on the “three nines” the number of sellers and buyers is quite questionable, because there is no information control there. From the point of view of objectivity, it is simply “zero”. But unfortunately, we have no other data,” he says.
Radu Shitov, director of the real estate agency Euroimobil, offers other options for checking the relevance of the data from the above-mentioned site. He claims that the annual turnover of apartments on the market is approximately equal to 5% of the municipality’s population. These are apartments bought and sold by citizens due to changes in family circumstances (children, new family, death, divorce, etc.) plus internal migration. The population of Chisinau municipality today is 665.5 thousand people. The sample of 5% is 33.7 thousand people. Assuming that the average family consists of two people, the approximate annual demand is about 16.8 thousand apartments. According to the cadastre data, 15.2 thousand apartments were sold in 2023, and in 2024 – 16.1 thousand apartments. It turns out that supply and demand are approximately balanced. By the way, coincidence or not, but on 999 md. in the heading “for sale” in Chisinau currently also appears about 16 thousand apartments.
We can go another way, and try to calculate the demand through the annual number of sales transactions and commissioned apartments. What is commissioned – reflects purchases in the primary market, the rest – sales in the “secondary”.
“It is possible to calculate supply and demand using cadastre and statistical data, but there will also be questions. I would not trust even these data. Everything here is quite formal, aimed at the shadow economy,” says Dmitri Tereburke. – In order to get a more or less true picture, we need normal market regulation and a quality information environment. Moreover, the quality of information must be impeccable”.
According to his conclusions, to understand what is today’s demand and what is the supply in the real estate market, the task is almost impossible. It can be done only approximately, empirically. “I have several acquaintances who want to sell their apartments. And judging by the situation, there is no queue behind them. Maybe there are more people who want to buy a new building. I don’t know. But according to my data, adequate buyers at today’s prices in new buildings in Chisinau do not hurry to buy real estate, because it is very expensive, such purchases would look reckless. I can say that the demand today is very insignificant. But there is a real bubble that can burst at any moment, believes Dmitri Tărăburke.
