More on Real Estate and Finance

I wanted to give a little more information about Real Estate here, as it is somewhat different than in the U.S. The majority of apartments here, whether low or high cost, operate similar to condos in the U.S. While in Seattle you can just look for an apartment building in the area you want, and see if they have vacancies, here the owners of apartments in each building are all different. This is why it is more effective (although more expensive) to go through an agency, which works with many different apartment owners, from individuals to firms. I tried to contact individual owners directly, but only a few want the hassle of fielding inquiries and handling everything, so the amount of apartments available direct are limited. However, I'm sure there are some avenues I'm missing, just from being new in the city. Until last month, often when a builder was putting up an apartment block, it was often financed by future owners, rather than banking, as financial services in Russia are still developing. Because of some high profile scandals where builders just collected money from people and never completed the buildings, the law was changed to limit such financing tools. In some ways, finance and banking are quite advanced here; you can pay for most utilities and cell phones, cable tv, etc. through ATMs with debit or credit cards. Most banks offer debit and credit cards, as well as automatic payroll deposit. However, mostly only western firms use the automatic deposit, because a lot of people here have two salary figures: an official one that is booked at the firm, and another that is on side, not booked, to avoid taxes. This makes it hard for people to gain credit in order to buy an apartment or car; usually they have to convince their employer to provide them with a letter that explains their full salary, which banks here generally accept in lieu of payroll
documents. On the less developed side, when I tried to pay for my university tuition, I had planned to just use my Visa debit card, however the bank my department uses only takes MasterCard. This is particularly ironic since I'm studying in the Department of World Politics and the bank is called International Investment Bank.