Who buys in Batumi: Georgians 37%, Europe 18%, Israel 10%

The striking thing about the table is how flat it is. The largest single foreign bloc in early 2026 was Europe at 18%, closely followed by Ukraine, Russia and Belarus at 16% and Israel at 10%. Turkey and the Arab countries sat at 4% and 3%. Nothing approaches the kind of concentration where one country's politics or currency can stall the whole market. That diversification is itself a feature worth pricing in, and it is the opposite of what people often assume about Batumi from the outside.

Georgian citizens took 37% of transactions in the first quarter, more than any foreign group, after a 2025 in which they reached 44%. That is a useful corrective to the idea that Batumi is a market built only on foreign money. It also means local credit conditions matter to resale prices: when mortgage rates fall and loan sizes rise, a large share of the buyer pool gets stronger. The flip side is that a domestic slowdown now reaches more of the market than it would have in 2024.

Israel's share slipped from 13% to 10% and Turkey's from 6% to 4% across the same period, while Europe recovered from 15% to 18%. Shares are not the same as volumes: because total sales rose 15.8% in the quarter, a smaller share can still mean a similar or larger number of buyers. Anyone reading a drop in their own country's share as a verdict on the market is probably reading it wrong. Exchange rates, flight connections and credit at home move these lines as much as anything happening in Batumi.

This is a survey of participating developers rather than a complete registry count, which is why a separate review of 2025 put foreign buyers at 52% of sales and Israeli buyers at 13% for that year, close to but not identical with these numbers. Two honest surveys of the same market will differ at the margin. What both agree on is the shape: foreign and local demand are roughly balanced, and no single nationality is holding the market up on its own.