The most popular foreign locations for Russian property buyers revealed

Statistics from Russian search giant Yandex have revealed that Spain is the most popular country among Russian overseas property buyers.

More than one million searches relating to Spanish residential property were made via Yandex over the last two years.

Bulgaria was the second most popular place for real estate search queries processed by Yandex, with 981,000 searches since 2016.

Germany was the next most popular country, slightly ahead of Italy. Some 530,000 searches for property in Germany were made by Russians between mid-2016 and the first quarter of 2018. Germany’s popularity has been soaring despite high prices and fierce competition.

Germany also outperformed Italy in the volume of individual transfers, receiving $1.2 billion in transfers between 2015 and 2017.

Another popular property investment destination for Russian buyers is Greece, mostly due to the introduction of the ‘Greek Golden Visa’, which enabled non-EU nationals to apply for EU residency if they invest a minimum of €250,000 in real estate in the country. About a year ago interest towards property in Greece started to increase. In the fourth quarter of 2016, for example, Yandex processed only 28,000 search queries, but this figure nearly doubled in the first quarter of 2018.

Overall, Russian nationals searched for Greek property 313,000 times through Yandex in the past two years.

The rest of the top 10 was made up by Montenegro (336,000 searches), Finland (288,000 searches), Czech Republic (253,000 searches), France (240,000) and Poland (219,000).