Non-EU property sales in Cyprus: really so big?

People have not done their homework

I wanted to do a video this week about real estate sales to non-EU nationals in Cyprus, because it is currently being debated in parliament and there are a lot of numbers being bandied about which are out of context.

But I have had one of those fortnights where you just can’t get to do research work because you have to do a thousand other bitty little red tape and other maddening things instead.

The result is that it has left me with zero patience to try technology. It is already a massive ‘pia’ that the Descript video-recording software does not confirm to you, while you are recording a screen, that it is actually recording that screen. You have to hope for the best and find out afterwards whether or not you messed up.

This is why I have been doing videos mainly as a PowerPoint presentation. That way, I don’t have to switch screens. But PowerPoint is limiting because you only have that one rectangle to squish things on. You can’t scroll down a website or an Excel file, for example. When my patience levels return I shall look for other software that allows you to bounce around different screens and see at the same time that this is being recorded. If you know of any software for tech semi-illiterates, let me know.

In the meantime, if you are an MP, the chart above is the only number you really need: contracts of sale to non-EU nationals accounted for 26.5% of the total in 2025, down from 27.5% of the total in 2024 and 31.7% of the total in 2023. If you exclude 2020-22 as Covid-19 years, you could even argue that the proportion has been on a declining trend, as it was 31.8% of the total in 2018 and 28.5% in 2019. By contrast, as the chart shows, sales to Cypriots have been well above 50% throughout the 2018-2025 period, reaching 59.5% in 2025.

A great deal of fuss has been made about foreign sales because people have just looked at the rising number of foreign buyers, and not done the mind-numbing task of pulling out numbers from separate PDF files to compare foreigners with Cypriot sales. Guess what? Cypriot sales have also been rising, so the proportions have not changed that much. In the chart below you can see that sales to Cypriots rose from 4,875 in 2018 to 10,859 in 2025; sales to non-EU nationals rose from 2,939 to 4,809 in the same period.

It does not help that people, by which I mean the audit office, have kind of mixed and matched transfers with sales. I avoid using transfers because I have never been able to reconcile total transfers with total sales. I believe that transfers might also include the bank taking your chorafi because you didn’t keep up with your mortgage payments.

In a report by the audit office in September (I am relying on StockWatch because the audit office links send you round in circles and you can’t find it), the audit office speculates that - maybe, possibly, perhaps, but we don’t know because there are no numbers - a lot of foreigners might be buying real estate via Cyprus-registered companies, so the number of sales to non-EU nationals might be higher than reported. It’s an audit office. Without any hard evidence it should not be speculating at all.

What the audit office should have done, and perhaps what parliament can do, is to note that the registrar of companies now has on record the nationality of every single company owner because of the legal requirement to list ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs). With a bit of technology it ought to be possible to make these records available to the land registry, on an anonymized basis, so that the land registry can record the nationality of any real estate purchases that are made through companies.

Only then shall we have the full picture and parliament can decide if anything needs to be done about it.

But prices rises are an important political problem

Meanwhile, Cystat has just produced a new report with a slightly different set of figures: probably because it is only looking at sales of residential properties. Here, you can see what the political issue is. While Nicosia skews the average, in almost every other town sales to foreigners (EU and non-EU) are larger than those to Cypriots. And other figures cited by Cystat in its report show that non-Cypriots also pay more per square metre. In the end, this pushes up the prices for everyone.

The affordability of housing is a pressing issue across the developed world. To paraphrase economist and all-round sage David McWilliams in his podcast last week, this is a ticking time-bomb. We have an ageing cohort that is asset-rich and doesn’t want to pay more tax, and a smaller cohort that cannot afford to buy houses, getting angrier by the day, with some of them ready to vote in parties whose ultimate aim is to do away with democracy. Global politics is now giving us a glimpse of what that might look like.

Chart source: Cystat, House Price index 2015-2024 report, Figure 8.

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