Canadian Builders Eye Russia's Housing Market

Canadian construction companies and their local partners are hoping to lure 10,000 middle-class families out of city apartments and into new suburban town-house developments over the next few years, a Canadian Embassy official was quoted as saying. The draw will be Canadian-style, wood-frame town houses, 10,000 of which are on track to go up on the outskirts of regional centers across Russia by 2005, said Valery Makarov, commercial officer at the Canadian Embassy. Model homes in the Moscow Region, Tver, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Vladivostok, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Nakhodka are already generating orders, Makarov said. The developments will typically be made up of two-story, 150-square-meter, semi-detached houses, which, unfinished, would cost about $60,000, excluding land and infrastructure costs, the St. Petersburg Times reported.