Russians from 2026 will be prohibited to sell and buy housing for cash.
The initiative of Svetlana Razvorotneva, deputy head of the Duma Committee on Construction and Housing and Communal Services, to ban real estate transactions for cash was supported by the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation, Izvestia reports.
The supervisory agency approved the deputy’s proposal, noting “the prevalence of facts of remote fraud in real estate transactions”, in the fight against which the proposed measure should help, follows from the response of the first deputy head of the General Prosecutor’s Office Anatoly Razinkin Razvorotneva.
Earlier, the deputy chairman of the Committee on Construction said that the bill is planned to be submitted to the State Duma in June-July and adopted by the end of 2025, and the proposed restriction will apply to housing more expensive than 1 million rubles. Amendments will be made to Articles 558 and 861 of the Civil Code (CC). The limit for the purchase of housing for cash will be set by the Russian government. Failure to comply with the conditions will lead to the annulment of the transaction.
The number of crimes related to the taking away of housing in Russia increased from 6 thousand in 2022 to 8 thousand in 2023, according to the explanatory note to the document. At the same time, the amount of damage to citizens reached 42 billion rubles (an increase of 10 billion).
“The bill to ban housing transactions for cash did not appear out of thin air. It is one of the steps to create in Russia a whole system for the security of buying and selling real estate.
The fact that it is necessary is confirmed by the sad statistics,” Razvorotneva told Izvestia.
The Prosecutor General’s Office noted that the proposed law should be extended to “standardization of issues” related to the organization of realtors’ work, including requirements for higher education, absence of a criminal record for economic crimes, etc.
“Since the Civil Code of the Russian Federation and the law on consumer rights protection establish only a framework for compensation of damages to the injured party, it is important to determine the nature of the damage to be compensated to the victim. According to Sergey Smirnov, senior partner of the Vysotsky Estate network, many Russians still believe only in cash, for which now more than 10-15% of transactions are made.
“Immediately after transactions, they withdraw these funds from bank accounts, and then they can transfer them to fraudsters,” he emphasized. According to the expert, the majority of real estate transactions are now already made by cashless payment and payment in cash will gradually come to naught as the generation accustomed to paper money leaves.