A new analysis by the Finance Ministry’s economics division says a widely held assumption is wrong: in every Israeli city, doctors buy more expensive apartments than high-tech workers and also direct a larger share of their wealth into real estate. The findings were presented by Galit Ben Naim in a post tied to the ministry’s monthly housing review, under the heading, “Is there a doctor in the audience?”
The report comes amid a cooling housing market. In April, only 1,366 new homes were sold on the open market, which Ben Naim called one of the lowest April totals since the early 2000s. She noted that April was affected by both the war and Passover, but because they overlapped, the weak sales still point to continued stagnation.
One striking example was Tel Aviv, where high-tech employees bought just nine second-hand apartments in April, even though about 84,000 people work in the sector there, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. Over the past two years, Tel Aviv accounted for about 10% of all high-tech home purchases, followed by Haifa at nearly 7%. But the average price of an apartment bought by a high-tech worker was about 4.6 million shekels in Tel Aviv versus about 2.1 million in Haifa. Jerusalem ranked only 12th, with about 2% of such purchases, despite having a similar number of high-tech jobs as Haifa.
Ben Naim said the data do not support claims that doctors have been leaving for tech because of wages. “No city was found where high-tech workers ‘beat’ doctors in the price of the apartments purchased,” she wrote, adding that the same result appears when using median prices. Doctors buying homes were slightly older, with a median age of 45 compared with 38 among high-tech buyers, but Ben Naim said the gap is not large and reflects different career paths. She also noted that 22% of doctors’ purchases were investment properties, compared with 13% among high-tech workers.
Industry executives said the data may reflect a broader shift: as high-tech workers have become more cautious amid layoffs and changes in the sector, doctors, whose jobs are not replaceable by artificial intelligence, are emerging as stronger buyers. Ben Naim also pointed to a positive trend in healthcare, saying the number of new medical licenses has risen in recent years, though not enough yet to affect housing demand significantly. “If they shorten public health waiting lines, that is enough,” she concluded.
