Who Is Really Buying Yerevan's Expensive Apartments

Yerevan’s new apartments carry price tags that rival some European cities, even as significant poverty persists in the country. In this clip, Dr. Vache Gabrielyan answers the question many Armenians and diaspora followers keep asking: who is actually buying all this housing, and why?

His answer is specific. The demand is driven largely, though not exclusively, by the Armenian diaspora, and two countries dominate: Russia and the United States, where the largest communities live. The motivations differ. Buyers from Russia want property outside Russia because they are uncertain about property rights and liquidity at home. Buyers from the United States also want assets held outside the country. What ties these purchases together, Gabrielyan explains, is that they rarely make sense as income-earning investments. Measured against rents, the asset prices often do not pay back over a medium or even long horizon.

Instead, he reframes the apartments as a form of savings. Many people in Armenia want to diversify their savings but do not trust or understand financial instruments, so they park value in tangible real estate. That logic, combined with periodic surges of interest from relocating Russians, helps explain a market that looks overheated by conventional measures. The moment matters because it connects the housing boom to the broader pattern Gabrielyan describes across the episode: an economy growing on inflows into non-tradable sectors rather than on competitive production. For anyone watching the South Caucasus property market, the role of the Armenian diaspora, and the lingering economic effects of the war in Ukraine, this is a concise and candid breakdown of where the money comes from and what it is really chasing.