Today, an official with the RoA government’s real estate appraisal division, Arman Petrosyan, stated that apartment prices had risen by 2.8% in the first quarter of 2010 in Yerevan and by 1.5% in the country’s outlying regions. Prices for private houses have gone up 2.9% across the board, he said. Mr. Petrosyan added that during the first quarter of 2010, real estate sales had dropped by 23.6%, while during the same period in 2009, they had risen by 22.4%. He said that the fall of the AMD, compared with the U.S. dollar, wasn’t of significant consequence in the real estate market, despite dropping some 20%.