Buying a home, whether a house or a flat, is probably the biggest outlay a person or a household will make in a lifetime. Any such decision should therefore be examined, weighed and costed from every possible angle.
Today, though, plenty of people never get as far as the decision. For them, buying a home is ruled out before they start; it does not even register as a possibility. Property prices have reached levels that put them out of reach for middle and low earners. And there are plenty of reasons why.
Transport costs have gone up, and so have raw material prices. Demand has soared on the back of population growth, driven by international companies and foreign workers. Supply has shrunk as properties are pulled off the market for short-term letting on Airbnb. Large numbers of students have arrived from abroad. Empty plots sit undeveloped for years. And then there is a building policy that, as it turns out, has been misguided.
Together, these factors have both reshaped and fragmented the market. The result is that there are not enough properties to meet demand, and the ones that are available do not meet buyers’ needs.
Ask Wire CEO Pavlos Loizou made a telling point in a recent article. Cyprus, he noted, does not have one market with different prices. In effect, it has different markets that happen to share the same island.
He explains: “The 2021 census recorded 492,931 residential units in Cyprus. Of these, 138,113, about 28 per cent, were vacant or used as temporary residences. Not all of them are immediately available to rent. But the figure proves that housing stock and actual housing supply are not the same thing.”
Loizou adds that “more permits do not automatically mean more affordable homes. In the first two months of 2026, the number of residential units approved through building permits in Cyprus rose by 79.2 per cent. Over the same period, flat prices rose by 10.8 per cent year on year. There is no contradiction. If new supply is in the wrong area, is aimed at a different buyer or is delivered several years later, it does not meet the local household’s need today. The market does not simply need more units. It needs the right units, in the right place, at the right price,” the Ask Wire chief stresses.
So what does all this mean? Adding new properties to the market will not necessarily solve the problem, either by meeting high demand or by bringing prices down. What is needed is an updated, comprehensive housing policy that takes account of today’s realities while also setting the market’s future course. No single department can deliver that, and not even a single ministry. It has to factor in, for example, where the labour market is heading and how many foreign workers might come to our island in the years ahead. It has to consider the universities’ strategy and how many international students they aim to attract. It has to know how many new hospitals, shopping centres and schools will be built, how traffic patterns will evolve and what infrastructure needs to be put in place.
Housing is not simply a matter of throwing homes onto the market. It matters where we build them, when we build them, what kind of homes they are and what needs they can meet. It matters how the surrounding area will develop, what other needs will arise, and so on. As we said, there is no single property market. There are many, and they are not alike.
