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Russian roulette?
Tatjana Valujeva who runs a private investment company has been buying St Petersburg property for the last 20 years and is encouraged by the growth of mortgages there which means that prices will only continue to rise.
Another popular investment location is the Black Sea resort Sochi host to the 2012 Winter Olympics and which has seen its prices treble in the last three years. The number of newly-rich buying swathes of holiday homes there has led to it being dubbed Russia's very own Riviera.
Russia is not shying away from the world stage either as the country looks to capture some of the limelight that put Dubai on the map with its plans to build the largest building in the world. Crystal Island, a Norman Foster-designed spiralling structure will cover 2,670,000 sq m and stand 450 metres tall.
It will accommodate 3,000 hotel rooms, 900 serviced apartments, office space, sports, shopping and entertainment centres and more bizarrely a clown school. Already dubbed "the Moscow Christmas Tree" it's due for completion in five years.
At the other end of the scale, however, the need to accommodate average working citizens has not gone unnoticed. In an attempt to level the market somewhat towards aspiring homeowners, former president Vladimir Putin announced a strategy to increase the number of affordable units by the development of new towns.
One such example is being built by the Dubai-based developer, Limitless (whose past projects include collaboration with Nakheel on the Palm Jumeirah, The World and the Jumeirah Islands).
This US$10.76bn project built on 44,000 acres outside Moscow will see the creation of 150,000 residential units.
To foreign investors this is only one of a number of opportunities. Regeneration of inner city areas is another and one that Horus Capital, a Russian-based developer in the commercial sector has benefited from.
It converted industrial hulks of buildings into offices in defunct inner city areas and has just seen its company valued at US$1bn. No wonder, international property funds have all gone into Russia.
Sticking to the capital, there remains plenty of opportunity for investment in Yakimanka opposite the Kremlin, as well as the less fashionable district of Mayakovskaya. Amateur investors looking to purchase less expensive properties would do well to look at St Petersburg.
Outside of the major cities, the oil towns hold huge potential investment driven by demand for housing from oil company employees at all levels in the market.
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