Iran's Hottest Housing Markets in Spring 2018: A Provincial Survey

EghtesadOnline: While many provinces registered declining home deals and rising prices during the first quarter of the current fiscal year that ended on June 21, others showed a vastly different trajectory.

News ID: ۷۸۴۱۰۴

01 October 2018

According to data published by Donya-e-Eqtesad, Financial Tribune's sister paper, from Iran's 31 provinces, Alborz, Ilam, South Khorasan, Khorasan Razavi, North Khorasan, Fars, Kerman, Kermanshah, Kohgilouyeh-Boyerahmad, Lorestan and Hormozgan registered a 50% rise in the number of home deals during this year's Q1 compared with the similar period of last year.

Kermanshah was first with a significant year-on-year growth in the number of home deals with 94.9% and was trailed by South Khorasan with 81.8% and Hormozgan with 73.1%.

This is while in Tehran Province, the number of Q1 home deals grew by an annual rate of 12.8% and was already showing signs of a massive decline compared to higher growths experienced in previous months, Financial Tribune reported.

In the capital city of Tehran, on the other hand, the number of home deals only grew by 5.2% by the end of this year's Q1, official data published by the Central Bank of Iran show.

The Statistical Center of Iran recently published a report indicating that the number of home deals across all urban areas of Iran increased by 29.7% during the first quarter of the current year on an annual basis.

The average price of each square meter of the floor area of a residential unit across all urban areas of Iran in Q1 grew by 30.3% compared with the first quarter of last year to reach about 19.37 million rials ($117 at the Sept. 29 Sana rate of 164,771 rials to the US dollar).

The SCI numbers have been calculated based on weighted averages, meaning that each province has had a different impact based on the number of home deals it has registered during that period.

According to Donya-e-Eqtesad report, Tehran Province had a 41% share of all home deals during this year's Q1 across the country, so it also had a very significant share, about 30%, in deciding average residential unit price changes across the country as well. That is important since the price of each square meter of a housing unit in Tehran during the first quarter of this year stood at about 60.1 million rials ($365) to signify a year-on-year surge of 36.8%, CBI data show.

Excluding Tehran's weight of the deals, the average price of each square meter of a housing unit across urban areas amounts to 10 million rials ($60), significantly lower than the weighted national average. This registers a yearly increase of 18.5% in average home prices.

But among the 11 provinces mentioned above, all of which registered an increase of at least 50% in the number of annual home deals in Q1, average price growths were less than 10% in two provinces. Three provinces experienced less than 20% average price hikes while five provinces saw average home prices grow by less than 30%.

"These provinces can be declared exceptions of countrywide housing deals from this perspective," Donya-e-Eqtesad wrote, explaining that even as they experienced massive growths in the number of home deals, which run counter to trends witnessed elsewhere, they saw average prices rise in a much less accentuated manner.

This means that not only housing markets in these provinces have been much more active during the Q1 compared to those of other provinces and are not experiencing stagnancy, their average home prices have also not followed the same trend.

This becomes more significant when considering that from the 11 provinces, Khorasan Razavi, Alborz and Fars, with Mashhad, Karaj and Shiraz as their respective centers, registered the largest price growth.