Best areas to buy property in Tbilisi

Around 90% of buyers in Tbilisi are Georgian. You are buying into a functioning domestic housing market, not an investment product aimed at foreigners.

Practically, that means you should think about who will rent the apartment and who will eventually buy it from you — a Georgian family, a young professional, an embassy tenant, a student — rather than about which building photographs best. Districts matter here in the ordinary way districts matter in any city: schools, metro, parking, noise, and how long it takes to get to work.

The established prestige district: tree-lined, close to Vake Park, embassies, good schools, the most expensive per square metre in the city.

Tenant: diplomats, senior professionals, well-off Georgian families.

Trade-off: you pay the most and your percentage yield is the lowest in the city. What you buy instead is the most reliable tenant demand and the easiest resale.

Warning: a lot of stock sold as 'Vake' is on the boundary. Check the actual street against a map before you accept the postcode premium.

Large, practical, well served by the metro, full of newer mid-rise blocks, universities and hospitals.

Tenant: students, medical staff, middle-income families — the deepest and steadiest rental pool in Tbilisi.

Trade-off: not beautiful and not fashionable. It is the district that most reliably turns a purchase into rent every month of the year.

Warning: quality varies enormously street to street and block to block. Visit at 8am on a weekday to see the parking and the traffic before you decide.

Central, walkable, characterful. Vera is the quieter, leafier version; Sololaki has the carved wooden balconies and the courtyards, immediately below Narikala.

Tenant: remote workers, long-stay visitors, people who want to walk everywhere.

Trade-off: the most attractive apartments in Tbilisi are here, and so are the worst-maintained buildings.

Warning: in the older stock, verify the structure and the shared systems seriously. A beautifully renovated apartment inside a building with a failing roof and no functioning owners' association is a recurring and expensive mistake.

Abanotubani, the sulphur baths, Meidan, the streets under the fortress. Tourist-facing and beautiful.

Tenant: short-let guests, overwhelmingly.

Trade-off: the strongest nightly rates in the city against the noise, the crowds and the maintenance burden of very old buildings.

Warning: this is the one part of Tbilisi where short-let regulation, building rules and neighbour objections are worth investigating before purchase rather than after. Ask specifically whether the building permits short-term letting.

Newer, cheaper, further out, and where much of Tbilisi's new-build supply actually is.

Tenant: Georgian families priced out of the centre.

Trade-off: the lowest entry price and the highest percentage yield on paper, against the longest commute and the thinnest foreign-buyer resale market.

Warning: this is where oversupply shows up first. If twenty near-identical blocks are going up around yours, the rent is set by the cheapest of them, not by yours.