The rent price of residential real-estate increased by 103% in December 2022 y-o-y, while the growth of asking rent price slowed down compared to the previous month by 3%, - according to the report published by TBC Capital.
In December 2022, asking sale price posted a sizeable growth relative to the same period of 2021 (+28%), while compared to November 2022, the average price per square m amounted to USD 1072. The real estate sale price was 6% higher compared to the previous month.
According to the document, in December 2022, 837 new apartments were sold, a 39.5% decrease compared to the same period of 2021, while old apartments showed positive growth, surpassing the 2021 figure by 1.5%. This suggests that in December 2021, the consumers were mainly concentrated on buying newer flats. Interestingly, in m-o-m terms, there was a notable increase observed for both new (+7.7%) and old (+2.3%) apartments, indicating strong demand on the market, especially for new properties. Therefore, the share of new units in all sales improved slightly relative to previous month (+1 pp).
According to TBC Capital, this abnormally high number of transactions in December 2021 was the effect of NBG’s decision to set the maximum mortgage loan limit in foreign currencies to 10 years instead of 15, starting January 2022. This set off a wave of consumers that were planning on purchasing properties. They decided to act immediately rather than wait for the regulation to kick in. Thus, the negative y-o-y growth was driven by high base effect.
