The City of Moscow awaiting major US investors

For the past 72 months Moscow has been receiving direct foreign investments into real estate and infrastructure.

Moscow Investors Association has started an unprecedented advertising campaign in the United States, which includes multiple ads in the Washington Post, among other top-tier metro outlets. The campaign goal is to attract foreign investors to Moscow - the city that has had a major construction boom in the last 5 years and is now growing at a record pace.

The new campaign, which will run from mid-August through September, features a catchy “Moscow is Doing Business” slogan and various colorful new sites of Russia’s capital. It also highlights impressive facts for the U.S. target audience: “Moscow’s Rust Belt – 17 percent of the city – will be redeveloped by contracting 1.2 million sq. feet of housing and commercial real estate by 2020”. “The urban development potential of New Moscow is over 1 billion sq. ft. Over 430 miles of roads and more than 30 miles of metro lines will be built by 2035.”

The ads also describe the New Moscow – a large private-public construction project, which will provide housing for 1.5 million of the city’s residents and will create 1 million new jobs.

Since Sergey Sobyanin was appointed Mayor of Moscow in 2010, the strategic priorities of the city development expanded to create new transportation hubs, increase mobility of the population, improve downtown development, rehabilitate industrial zones and enhance embankments along the Moscow River.

Moscow has also made it to the world's top three cities by the pace of new subway lines construction. A total of over 34 km of new lines and 18 metro stations have been completed between 2011 and 2015. Starting from 2016, the city authorities are planning to commission 10 new metro stations every year. This pace can only be matched by Beijing and Shanghai.

According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Moscow is ahead of London and New York in new construction output with 1.74 of new sq. m per capita. Moscow has also ranked as the 'greenest' city among the three capitals. The green area of the Russian capital is twice as large as in New York and by 2% larger than London’s.

The breakthroughs could not have been unnoticed. “For the past 72 months Moscow has been receiving direct foreign investments into real estate and infrastructure. The investment flow is ensured: a construction permit for a building less than 1,500 sq.m., as required by the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings, can now be obtained in just 9 web clicks,” said Lubov Tsvetkova, the Chairwoman of Moscow Investors Association.

Out of all real estate that has been built in Moscow, 89% was funded by investors and only 11% was used from the city budget. By targeting major U.S. investment institutions, the City of Moscow is hoping to solidify financing opportunities and to expand its portfolio. Recently, administrative barriers for new construction projects in Moscow have been lowered as investors have voted with their wallets for the change.

About the company
A non-profit Moscow Investors Association was created in 1994. Currently, the Association has about 100 member companies, which include investment firms, developers, construction companies, architecture and design firms, consulting corporations and others. The main objective of Moscow Investors Association is to foster a favorable investment climate in the real estate sector, to help investors and developers implement projects, and to establish and to improve rules and regulations in the City of Moscow.