Housing prices in Yerevan have increased by almost 10 percent in the past year, an Armenian government agency said on Friday.
The Cadaster Committee also reported an even sharper rise in the number of real estate transactions in Armenia. It said it registered over 16,000 such deals last month, up by 17 percent from July 2018.
This may well explain a 9.8 percent year-on-year rise in the average cost of Yerevan apartments recorded in July this year. The committee gave no such figure for other parts of the country where housing prices have always been much lower than in the Armenian capital.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian was quick to seize upon these numbers, portraying them as a further indication of public confidence in his government and Armenia’s future. According to Pashinian, the domestic housing market was stagnant before the 2018 “Velvet Revolution” as many Armenians had trouble finding buyers for their homes due to a high rate of emigration from the country.
“Now the opposite process is underway: buyers are many and sellers few,” Pashinian wrote on his Facebook page.
Pashinian also said that the overall volume of mortgage lending in Armenia more than doubled in the first half of 2019. “This is a record figure for at least the past decade,” he said.
Increased remittances from Armenians working abroad may have also contributed to the higher real estate prices. According to the Armenian Central Bank, they rose by 13 percent, to $705 million, in January-May 2019.
Also, economic growth in the country appears to have accelerated in the first half of this year after slowing down to 5.2 percent last year. The Armenian economy expanded by 7.5 percent in 2017.
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