Tbilisi issues 1,500 to 2,000 building permits a year — and nine in ten are for single houses

Teimuraz Bolotashvili, who heads the Architecture Service at Tbilisi City Hall, described the city as issuing roughly 1,500 to 2,000 construction permits a year, with something like 85 to 90 per cent of them going to individual residential houses. Counted by floor area, the picture inverts: multi-apartment buildings make up the largest share of what is actually being built. Both statements are true at once, and the gap between them is why permit counts are a poor proxy for housing supply. One permit can be a family extending a house in Didi Dighomi or a developer putting up 200 flats, and only the second changes what is available to buy or rent.

Individual house permits surged after the pandemic, then levelled off and have slipped a little in recent years, though they remain roughly 20 to 30 per cent above where they were five years ago. Permits for warehouses and industrial buildings have been climbing, which fits a city absorbing more logistics and light production on its edges. Overall development is described as running at around 4 million square metres a year. None of this is a forecast; it is a description of what has already been approved, which is why it is useful — approvals are the earliest reliable signal of what will exist in two or three years.

If you are buying for rental income, permit totals tell you almost nothing on their own; what matters is permitted floor area for multi-apartment buildings in the specific districts you are considering, because that is the supply that will compete with your flat. If you are a developer, the rise in warehouse and industrial approvals is the more interesting line — it points to demand for a product class with fewer competitors than one-bedroom flats. And if you are weighing a plot on the city's edge, the individual-house share is a reminder that much of Tbilisi's permit activity is private households, not the market you are selling into.