Finance Ministry Data Show How the High-Tech Crisis Is Reaching Tel Aviv’s Housing Market

An analysis published by the deputy chief economist at the Finance Ministry points to weakness in Tel Aviv’s housing market: only 86 second-hand apartments were sold in the city in April. According to the data, just 11% of buyers of second-hand apartments in the city were high-tech workers, a significant drop from earlier analyses. The report comes amid waves of layoffs in high tech and a decline in the employment of research and development workers in the sector, for the first time in a decade.

The latest analysis, published by Galit Ben Naim, was based on real estate tax data for April. The figure she highlights is especially sharp: in April, only 86 second-hand apartments were sold in Tel Aviv, a city she says has about 220,000 apartments and roughly 7,000 units for sale at any given moment. The comparison she offers illustrates the decline: “A gap of only 30 transactions between Tel Aviv and Tiberias. An understatement is an understatement.”

What is behind the drop? Ben Naim points to a notable finding in the composition of buyers: only 11% of buyers of second-hand apartments in Tel Aviv in April were high-tech employees, a significant decrease compared with her previous analyses. This is, as she notes, “in a city so strongly identified with high-tech workers.”

The boom in the high-tech industry in recent years has been seen as one of the main drivers of the surge in real estate prices in Tel Aviv, at rates far higher than elsewhere in the country. Many projects were marketed directly to high-tech workers, many of whom made large sums of money from the wave of public offerings in recent years. Against this backdrop, last year the average price of a four-room apartment in Tel Aviv passed 5 million shekels for the first time.

The dramatic figure presented by Ben Naim comes amid widespread layoffs in the high-tech sector and the prolonged stagnation in the number of workers in the industry. As the annual report of the Israel Innovation Authority published last week showed, in 2025 there was, for the first time in a decade, a decline in the number of local research and development employees, the segment with the highest average salary in the industry.

Is the retreat of high-tech workers from the market what caused the sharp drop in demand for apartments in the city? Ben Naim is cautious and says it is “too early to determine,” but she adds an indirect sign: “Among the many ads from contractors these days, we do not see offers aimed at this population of high-tech workers.”

In the market for new apartments in Tel Aviv, the picture is somewhat different. The share of high-tech workers there stands at 18%, and contractor offers, which Ben Naim says are becoming “more and more creative,” are still sustaining demand. But here too there is a surprising finding about the identity of the buyers: two-thirds of buyers of second-hand apartments are Tel Aviv residents themselves, while in the market for new apartments, city residents make up only one-third.

Who is filling the gap? Some of the buyers are coming from cities that have hardly appeared in Tel Aviv purchase data in the past, such as Ofakim, Netivot, Beersheba and Dimona. Ben Naim wonders whether these are באמת people planning to move to the city, or whether they are trying to make capital gains by taking advantage of the financing benefits offered by contractors, which could also put them at future risk.