Summer housing market expectations fall short, catching sector ‘off guard’, say stakeholders

AMMAN — This year's housing market has been defined by rising prices and declining purchasing power, according to stakeholders.

The last three months have seen apartment sales drop by at least 20 per cent in Amman, and by at least 30 per cent in other governorates, according to housing expert and real estate investor Mahmoud Salah, who spoke to The Jordan Times on Tuesday.

“Stakeholders are concerned that this will have an outsized effect on the local housing market,” Salah said. 

“The current situation caught all stakeholders off guard, because we were expecting people who are coming from abroad to be interested in buying property for when they visit during the summer, or even to rent and obtain extra income,” he added.

Salah stated that the sector started to weaken in April, and has since started becoming somewhat of a “frozen market”.

President of the Jordan Housing Developers Association (JHDA) Kamal Awamleh told The Jordan Times that “there is an apparent housing market sales plunge of around 30 per cent across the Kingdom,” with current trends indicating that around 30,000 apartments will be sold towards the end of the current year.

Earlier, Awamleh said that housing sales witnessed an increase of around 25 per cent during the first quarter of 2023 when compared with the same period of 2022.

“Summer is the prime time for expatriates to buy apartments in Jordan. However it seems things did not go as expected this year,” he said.