Developer instalment plans now sit outside the mortgage rules — and a former central banker calls them quasi-mortgages

The usual structure is that the buyer pays the developer in instalments over two to three years, and a bank then refinances whatever is left. Otar Nadaraia, a former vice governor of the National Bank, describes these arrangements as quasi-mortgages and says the absence of regulation around them is a major issue. Three features explain the concern: they are mostly denominated in foreign currency, they are exempt from the payment-to-income caps that bind bank lending, and they may not appear in credit bureau records at all. Down payments as low as nothing are now being offered.

Galt & Taggart figures cited in the report put the Georgian-citizen share of Tbilisi apartment purchases at about 74% in 2026, down from about 85% in 2023, with Israeli citizens at about 11%, Russian at about 4% and other nationalities at about 11%. The market has also moved upmarket in composition: apartments priced below 1,100 dollars per square metre were 68.8% of the market in 2024 and 49.5% in 2026. Average primary-market pricing in Tbilisi was about 1,417 dollars per square metre in June 2026, and apartment sales in the city ran to roughly 2.45 billion dollars from January to July, up 27% year on year.

If you are buying on a developer plan, the risks are not hypothetical and they are yours, not the regulator's. Ask what happens if the bank declines to refinance at the end of the instalment term, since the plan assumes a refinancing that nobody has underwritten yet. Ask which currency the obligation is in and who carries the exchange risk if the lari moves. Ask whether the obligation is reported to the credit bureau, because an unreported debt can still be a debt when you next apply to borrow. And on the wider market, Nadaraia's stated warning sign for a bubble is prices rising much faster than general inflation over a short span — he notes Georgia's gap is not yet as wide as it was before the 2008 correction.