Alexei Shepel has found a great way to make money from other people's construction projects

Shepel, then a young mathematician and graduate of the Kharkiv Higher Military Command and Engineering School, made his first big money in the early 1990s trading computers and food. He started investing the proceeds in real estate transactions: he bought mass housing at the excavation stage, and sold it in an already built house.

One of Shepel's partners, the Glavstroyprom construction company, had a project for a panelized apartment building designed in the Soviet era for military personnel. In 2001, Shepel won a competition to build a neighborhood in the south of Moscow and immediately found that he could not build anything: all series of panel houses belong to the house-building factories, not willing to share with outsiders. Shepel did not try to buy the rights to any series, and instead bought a share in the design institute - "Central Research Institute of Housing", after which it developed a new series of houses based on the project "Glavstroyprom".

Shepel patented the result under the name C222 and built up his neighborhood with these houses.

Shepel claims that the development and patenting of the C222 series cost him $10 million. This series is one of the last ones created in Russia, it attempts to mitigate the consequences of the birth trauma of obsolete panel house building - a limited number of apartment layouts and building configurations. There are 47 registered variants of block-sections (simply put, entrances) in this series, which makes it possible to m