The mechanism for transferring the rights and obligations of the original developer of a problem property to a new developer is not regulated at the legislative level. A change of developer in such cases is carried out according to the general rules of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation on changing persons in an obligation. This procedure acquires additional specificity when the developer is changed by attracting a private investordeveloper by the executive authorities of a constituent entity of the Russian Federation through preferences. The latter became possible relatively recently, after the novelties of 2014–2015, in the land legislation of Russia and not yet sufficiently researched in the legal literature, and also not universally recognized by regional authorities, and not fully taken into account in the legislation of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation. The purpose of the article is to study the innovations of the federal legislator aimed at correcting the situation with injured participants in shared construction, in the context of the implementation of the legal mechanism for change of original developer of a problem property by attracting a private investor-developer. As an illustration, process of changing the developer to a specific Problem Object located on the territory of the urban district of Volgograd City and the corresponding regional legislation adopted in pursuance of the legislative initiatives of the federal center. The criteria for analyzing the actual impact of legal regulation are a set of features of the Smart Regulation concept, in the presence of that a particular legal regulation can be considered as “smart” one. Consideration of the current legal regulation in this segment of the economy made it possible to state the positive nature of changes in legislation, which in a relatively short time led to a significant shift in solving the problem of affected participants in shared-equity construction. The problems faced by the developer-investor in the form of unintended negative consequences of taking over the rights to a problematic object, that are actually a dead end from the point of view of their resolution in court, but have an out-of-court legal solution, have also been studied. When writing the study, the following methods were inplemented: formal logic, system-structural analysis, interpretation of law.