Batumi’s July slowdown hides a stronger resale market — and foreign buyers still account for 48%

Batumi’s residential market lost momentum in July, but not uniformly. Colliers Georgia figures published by BM.GE show 1,378 apartment transactions, down 11.8% from July 2025, while market value fell 5.2% to $92 million.

Inside new projects, registered primary-market transactions fell 32.8% year on year while secondary transactions rose 19.1%. Colliers cautions that July 2025 included bulk registrations in several projects, lifting the comparison base. The resale increase is therefore a cleaner signal of current activity than the primary headline.

The weighted average price of newly built apartments was $1,376/m², almost flat at -0.1% year on year. The visible primary average fell 14.4%, but Colliers says that excluding one expensive project bulk-registered a year earlier, the primary average would have risen about 2%. New-project resale prices rose 9.1%.

Foreign citizens represented 48% of transactions in old and new projects, versus about 50% for Georgian buyers. The foreign share was 47% in June; in Tbilisi it was only 12% in July. Batumi is therefore much more exposed to external demand, but the resale growth also shows liquidity beyond developer sales offices.

Estate Briefing’s earlier Tbilisi analysis showed primary and secondary demand rising together. Batumi gives the opposite headline but the same lesson: total transactions alone are insufficient; registration timing, resales, buyer nationality and project mix matter.

For project-level comparison in Batumi, HomeRadar can be used to move from citywide statistics to individual developments and developers.

The next useful test is whether resale strength persists while foreign buyers remain near half of transactions. If so, Batumi looks more like a maturing market with deeper resale liquidity than a developer-led boom simply losing steam.