MARKET INSIGHTS

By Meir Rubenstein. A buyer offered NIS 3.5 million on a Jerusalem apartment listed at 4.1 and got total silence. Sellers measure your offer against what the apartment upstairs sold for, not their asking price, and in Jerusalem they know that number.

By Yaniv Gabbay. An American buyer calls the number on an ad, gets the address, then asks his own agent to show it. In Israel that call matters: the agent who gave you the information is the one who earned the fee, and the courts have enforced it, sometimes at double.

By Chaim Shulman. Put 10% down, a builder's loan carries the rest, and the developer covers the interest. Is it too good to be true? It depends on the buyer. The loan is real, but its cost is built into the apartment price, and the loan is in your name.

By Yaniv Gabbay and Abe Truitt. Every objection to 3D scans was made about listing video fifteen years ago. Photographs won, video didn't, and a scan is something else again: not a story about the apartment, but the apartment as a record.

By Chaim Shulman. Some of the best-priced new projects in Israel move through agents before public sales open. What going straight to the developer really saves you, and what it costs.

Prepared by the Gabai editorial de

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