All is not well in the Serbian and greater Balkan housing market.

In big cities in the Balkans, housing supply outstrips demand, yet prices have skyrocketed. Experts smell a rat.

In 2010, an offshore company called Mellimate made a foray into the Skopje real estate market, snapping up a number of properties within a building in the very centre of the North Macedonia capital.

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Market logic upended

Big cities up and down the Balkans have experienced construction booms over the past five or six years, despite only modest population increases.

In the Kosovo capital Pristina, the latest available data on empty apartments is from the census of 2011, when 15,000 uninhabited housing units were registered. The construction boom was just getting underway, and since then 575 building permits have been issued for multi-residential buildings with a total development space of nearly six million square meters. The next census is scheduled for the autumn.

In a way, this is every bit as bad as NATO’s constant meddling in Serbia.

This is further proof that all schools of economics operate in a long-gone fantasy. It also speaks to the US-style financialization of everything. And the need to police the hell out of finance and especially foreign financial interference. Not that long ago, Serbia for one, sold off the old “commie block” housing developments to young Serbians for essentially closing costs. I know someone who lives in one such home and it has been a remarkably positive development for everyone. Now with prices rising due to the infusion of funny money, the young of today are faced with circumstances not unlike those that tore America apart over the past 50 years. There’s still time to reverse this curse, and it’s good that “experts” are recognizing the smell. It is tinged with sulfur.