Most people want to relocate

By the German Gomez Picasso

Director of the Real Estate Report

It is true that there are currently many properties listed for sale, but it is also true that the prices already dropped between 35% and 40%, and that article started generating more demand again. And it is also true that the vast majority of us would like to move. These data come from a survey we carried out in which, of the 386 people who participated, 74.1% said they wanted to relocate.

What is surprising is that the majority of respondents (56.2%) they want to go to a house, with a park and a garden; and the penetration of teleworking and the search for a better lifestyle that the media and social networks proclaim must surely have a lot to do with it.

The term Americans use to describe this behavior is YOLO. (“You only live once” or “you only live once”). It could also happen that a large part of the offer of published properties responds to a utopia: “I sell the two-room apartment and, putting a small difference in money, I move to a castle”.

Another interesting fact that emerges from our survey is that almost everyone wants a modern house; modern and minimalist styles add up to 63.5% of the votes in a system where the respondent had images of each architectural style. The classic style is in third place with only 12.1% of the vote. The audience has definitely changed.

In short, there is a lot of intention to move, the sector is experiencing a good time and beyond what is happening in the rest of the sectors of the economy, the real estate sector is the only or almost the only sector that remains fully dollarizedbecause not even the peasants are paid in dollars at a free rate.

In the Federal Capital, the acts are recovering little by little, but in the Province of Buenos Aires and in various locations in the interior, demand has begun to activate and the amounts are approaching the average levels of recent decades.

Today the average value of the apartments used at CABA is US $ 1583 per square meter; in GBA, US $ 1,470 per m2 and the average of the main indoor locations is less than US $ 1,000. Many already believed that these values ​​were low reaching 40% from the peak of 2018 and that have returned to the prices of 12 years ago, it will be difficult to drill them, especially in a world where the price of assets has not stopped rising in recent years.

Some do another math: with the inflation of recent months in the US, in less than 8 years I would lose the purchasing power of half of my dollar savings if I had them in the mattress. The famous 350,000 million dollars that the Argentines have are the ones that move the market again.

But let’s not be fooled: How many years has it been since an employee was able to buy a home from savings? A few days ago an important real estate agency told us: “Parents go out to buy apartments for their children because they see that they cannot buy and they do not even give them the income to be able to rent”.

On the construction side, momentum is strong, with dollar costs super-written off, people take their savings in pesos before losing purchasing power or in dollars before pesos inflation beats devaluation . And we really ask ourselves: Was another whitewashing required for construction at this time?

And on the other, the rental market, exploited, almost without supply, with prices that fly and go more and more towards total informalization. Nothing is said about the repeal of the rent law, but if the current situation persists, it will quickly go to “zero rent”. There will be no formal offer directly. The novelty will stop being the increase in rents to become that there are no rents. And it’s only a matter of months.