Tbilisi asking rents have fallen three years running. The official rent index says rents went up

An asking-rent series tracks what landlords put on the market. A rent price index tracks what sitting tenants are being charged, as part of consumer price collection. They answer different questions, and in Tbilisi they have come apart: asking rents down three years in a row, actual rents slightly up. The most straightforward reading is that listings had drifted above what the market would pay and have been correcting, while existing tenancies — where rent changes at renewal, by negotiation, often in lari — have crept up with general prices. If you are a landlord re-letting a flat, the asking series is the one describing your situation. If you are a tenant staying put, the index is.

Gross rental yields in Georgia averaged 7.42% in February 2026 against 7.53% a year earlier — Tbilisi at 7.53% and Batumi at 7.31%. A fall of roughly a tenth of a percentage point is almost nothing, which looks strange next to a double-digit fall in asking rents. The arithmetic resolves it: yield is rent over price, and Georgian prices have risen only slowly in nominal terms and slightly fallen in real terms, so both halves of the fraction have been soft at once. The warning in that is simple. A stable headline yield can conceal a weakening rent line, and a buyer who underwrites at 7.4% on today's asking rent in a market where asking rents have dropped three years running is underwriting the top of a range, not the middle of it.

The sales side has not followed the rent side down. Nationwide apartment sales came to 78,500 in 2025, up almost 6% on the year, with the secondary market accounting for 63% of them. Tbilisi did 42,388 sales, up 4.3%; Batumi did 17,478, up 15%. So buyers keep buying while asking rents soften — which is what a market looks like when purchases are being driven by something other than the rental return: owner-occupiers, buyers moving money into property as a store of value, and purchases attached to residence planning. For a landlord that is a mixed signal rather than a reassuring one. It means your exit is liquid, and it also means your competition for tenants includes a growing number of flats bought by people who are not especially sensitive to what the rent is.

These series come from different compilers with different methods, and the page that gathers them flags internal inconsistencies of its own — a headline quarterly figure that does not match the text, and a mortgage rate with no stated source. That is a reason to use the direction of travel rather than the decimal. Three practical habits follow. Underwrite on an achieved rent you can verify from a real tenancy, not on a listing price. Model a vacancy assumption rather than twelve months of income, because a softening asking market lengthens the time between tenants. And check the headline yield against your own numbers after management, repairs, the 5% residential rental tax and the agent's cut — gross figures around 7% are the start of the calculation, not the end of it.