Aravot.am asked the executive director of one of the hotel and restaurant complexes operating in the historical center of Gyumri, Vardan Srtashyan, whether the Russian programmers who moved to Gyumri as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian war left, or whether they continue to live in the second city of Armenia. Months ago, Vardan Srtashyan spoke about the increase in house rental prices in Gyumri due to the move of Russian developers to Gyumri.
“Those people are not tourists, they came to Armenia to live. In the initial period, when they came to Armenia and did not know where to look for an apartment, how to do it, naturally what was expected happened. Some people, taking advantage of the situation, increased the prices of apartments to astronomical figures. Demand creates supply, that law works very well in Gyumri. The people of Gyumri who had friends in Russia and the USA, and these people’s houses were empty, very quickly fixed those houses and started renting them out to Russians.
We know many Russians who have even bought apartments, and the prices in the housing market have also increased. That was the reason that there was a crisis at one point, but at the moment there is no problem, people have settled, many have opened their own companies, they make their money in Armenia. Let me say that they are well-off people, they have medium and high income, who can afford to live normally outside their country, in the conditions of a foreign country.”
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To our question about if there are people among Russian developers who have bought an apartment in Gyumri, Vardan Srtashyan answered that although most of them have moved to Yerevan, there are also some settled in Gyumri. “Their main place of accommodation is Yerevan, it can be said that the free housing stock of the Mush district of Gyumri is 90 percent occupied, many have rented apartments in that district. People who emigrated from Russia never take an apartment for a daily rent, they rent it long-term, in most cases, taking into account how long they will stay, they buy apartments. Yes, they also bought apartments in Gyumri. Communicating with my friends in the field of information technology, I see that quite a large number of companies have been established in Armenia and in many cases they associate the low level of the exchange rate between the dollar and the euro with the activities of Russian companies, because a large amount of dollars is coming and the value of the dollar has naturally fallen,” Vardan Srtashyan said.
Nune AREVSHATYAN
