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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (41594)	10/21/2008 2:13:15 AM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 220317

You can always get sky-high prices in strange places under certain conditions. For instance, if you wanted a west European quality hotel room in Ukraine just 10 years ago, it was obscenely expensive. There were several reasons: 1) Plenty of demand. 2) City gave no permission to build new hotels, which were in demand. 3) Lack of qualified people to build it, maintain it and to serve the customers. 4) No suitable infrastructure, hotels had to make own water filtering, water pumps etc., power backup etc. 5) Probably some "coordination" of hotels to prevent newcomers from entering the market. Many people rented luxury apartments that were cheaper than the cheapest western standard hotel rooms. This year I had a wonderful apartment, looking out towards the main square of Kyiv. However, I was happy to be on the same water line as McDonald's when the water system broke down. Still today, many products are very, very expensive in Ukraine, like original HP ink. You can actually buy HP printers in Kyiv, for which you cannot buy ink. In a place like angola, if you make enough money, what do you do? You cannot spend the money on food or on local products (who wants to buy truckloads of fruit for own use?), so if somebody wants to rent you a really good flat for $7,000 a month, and the alternative is crap, you take it. You don't start comparing this to the prices at home, because you're not at home. A very important parameter in strange places for apartments, is that there are two lifts, working with different sources of power. Guess why... :-) I know a guy who lives in such a place, and everything is pretty ok - except that when it started to rain heavily the first time, the parking garage got flooded so much that the cars were under water. So now he parks on the street and pays a guy to watch his car all night.