Batumi's rental yield slipped from 8.8% to 7.4% — and about 12,400 flats sat unsold

The snapshot puts 2025 apartment sales in Batumi at 17,478 units, roughly 15% more than the year before, with the value of the market around 1.3 billion dollars after 24% annual growth. Average turnkey pricing moved to 1,865 dollars a square metre from 1,699 a year earlier. The spread across the city is wide: the premium pockets of old Batumi clear more than 3,000 dollars a square metre, while peripheral districts trade below 1,500. Two areas carried most of the volume, with more than 6,800 transactions on the New Boulevard and close to 4,000 around the Alley of Heroes.

The same review reports average daily rental rates of about 35.6 dollars in 2025, essentially unchanged on the year. Purchase prices rose while the nightly rate did not, and the arithmetic does the rest: the average rental yield fell from 8.8% in 2024 to 7.4% in 2025. That is still a respectable return by European standards, but it is a full point and a half thinner than the number many buyers were quoted when they first looked at Batumi. Anyone modelling a purchase on a yield they heard two years ago is modelling the wrong market.

By the end of 2025 unsold inventory in Batumi had risen nearly 14% over the year, to somewhere around 12,400 units. Foreign buyers accounted for 52% of sales, with Israeli purchasers alone at 13% and described as the fastest-growing group, alongside demand from the EU and from neighbouring countries. Rising sales and rising unsold stock together mean one thing: completions are arriving faster than buyers are absorbing them. For a seller that is competition; for a buyer it is leverage, particularly on a developer's remaining units in a finished building.

Two practical conclusions follow. First, ask for a building's actual occupancy and nightly rate over a full twelve months rather than a peak-season figure, because the citywide average daily rate did not move last year even as prices did. Second, treat location within Batumi as the variable that matters most, given that the gap between the old-town premium and the periphery is more than double. A flat bought at a peripheral price and let at a peripheral rate can still work; a flat bought at a central price and let at a peripheral rate will not.