How will paid parking inside Moscow’s Garden Ring impact office real estate? Head of the Representative Office of RD Group Roman Tkachenko shared his thoughts on this topic with a journalist from Interfax Real Estate.
The paid parking zone in Moscow is set to expand to include the entire area inside the Garden Ring by the end of this year. Since December 5 a fee is being charged for street side parking in the Yakimanka and Zamoskvorechye districts and starting December 25 this will be expanded to include all public parking within the Garden Ring. The cost of parking was raised from 50 rubles (about $1.50) to 80 rubles (about $2.50) per hour for the zone within the Boulevard Ring starting December 5.
ROMAN TKACHENKO
According to Interfax Real Estate, “market experts are unanimous: there will be no exodus! Demand from tenants is not dependent on public parking.” This position is shared by Roman Tkachenko, Head of the Representative Office of RD Group.
The situation is such that the decision on whether to lease a particular office or not is made by a company’s top management, which is not going to be directly impacted by parking problems. Having an office located in the center of the city is a mandatory requirement for many companies: such a location provides advantages in doing business, recruiting personnel, status and so on.
Moreover, according to Roman Tkachenko, the majority of office workers always use public transportation, so the new initiatives of Moscow authorities will not affect them. Furthermore, the lack of a parking place is not going to substantially impact the interest of an employee in having a prestigious job, so instances in which employees quit over this are going to be far and few between and thus will not impact the business of office tenants on the whole.
Will the introduction of paid parking within the Garden Ring influence demand for offices outside the MKAD? Roman Tkachenko is confident that offices outside the MKAD will only become popular only if Moscow authorities follow through on their plans to create municipal agglomerations, when new highly developed clusters with quality office premises, leisure opportunities and residential infrastructure appear on the outskirts of the megalopolis.
The full article in Russian can be found via this link.