New government data released this week shows the slowest April for home sales in roughly two decades, with builders running negative cash and the buyer’s market growing more lopsided. Yet the same figures carry a quiet positive for sellers: the mountain of unsold new apartments shrank for a third month in a row. Alongside the data, the week brought a Supreme Court tax fight that could reach tens of thousands of buyers, a regulator threatening to shut down high-rise cranes, and a criminal indictment over extortion at Tel Aviv building sites.

Here is what moved.

The headline number: a 20-year low in sales

The market is frozen, and this week put hard figures on it. According to the Finance Ministry’s Chief Economist review, about 5,080 apartments were bought across Israel in April 2026. That is one of the lowest totals for any April since the early 2000s, with only April 2020, the start of COVID, and April 2023 coming in lower. Sales fell about 31% from March and about 19% from a year earlier.

Strip out government-subsidized homes and the free market looks worse still: only 4,340 deals, down roughly 36% from March. Used-apartment sales, normally the steady half of the market, fell hardest, dropping about 35% in the month to around 2,974. In Tel Aviv the second-hand market nearly stopped, with just 86 used apartments sold in April, a 59% fall from a year earlier. Builders sold only 1,366 brand-new apartments on the open market.

The strain showed up in builders’ bank accounts. After paying for materials and labor, developers’ actual cash flow from new-apartment sales turned negative in April, at about minus 200 million shekels for the month, a figure that does not even include their loan costs. The Chief Economist summed up the month as unusually weak, even by long-term standards.

Unsold stock eases for a third month, but stays enormous

Separately, the Central Bureau of Statistics released its apartment-sales report on Sunday, and it carried the week’s one piece of relief for the industry. The stock of unsold new apartments held by builders stayed near 84,000 at the end of April, broadly flat on the prior month and down for a third consecutive month from its January peak of about 86,000. The bureau put supply at about 29.5 months, meaning that is how long it would take to sell everything at the current pace.

The easing is real but modest, and analysts note it owes more to builders slowing new construction than to a jump in sales. The pile is also lopsided by area. The Tel Aviv district holds the largest share, while Jerusalem stands out as the exception to the national trend, with its own unsold stock still sitting near a record at more than 10,000 apartments even as other cities thin out. Over the three months from February to April, total sales fell about 15% from the prior quarter, the figure echoed across this week’s coverage.

For buyers, the takeaway is plain. Sellers are holding inventory measured in years, not months, and every month a unit sits empty costs the builder interest. That is the pressure now working in a buyer’s favor.

Why prices still look flat while buyers get deals

The published price index barely moved this week, down about 1.2% over the year, and that gap between frozen sales and flat prices is the story underneath the story. Builders are cutting the real price without touching the advertised one, using financing offers instead so the recorded sale price stays high.

The common tool is the “20-80” deal, where a buyer pays 20% at signing and the rest only at delivery, with the builder covering interest in between. On a 2,500,000 shekel apartment with about 2,000,000 deferred for two and a half years at a 5.5% borrowing rate, the interest a buyer avoids works out to roughly 275,000 shekels, close to 11% of the price (our own simplified estimate from those terms). The price index cannot see that, but the buyer’s wallet can. In recent reviews, somewhere between a fifth and a third of free-market deals carried reported financing incentives, with Tel Aviv near 37%, and some incentives go unreported entirely. The Bank of Israel limited these deals through the end of 2026, which makes them scarcer and may push more builders toward straight price cuts.

Tax Authority takes the Ashdar ruling to the Supreme Court

In the week’s biggest legal development, the Israel Tax Authority appealed a precedent-setting ruling in the Ashdar case to the Supreme Court, calling the situation chaos in the property market. The lower ruling found that developers who win Mehir LaMishtaken (price for the occupant) land tenders act as construction contractors for the state rather than as buyers of a land right, and so should not owe purchase tax on the land. That could mean hundreds of millions of shekels in refunds to developers, with more than 150 similar appeals waiting nationwide.

The part that matters for ordinary buyers surfaced in a separate interview this week. A senior tax official, Yaniv Cohen, confirmed on a podcast that one option being examined is taxing tens of thousands of subsidized-apartment buyers as if they had bought land, which could leave them with a purchase-tax bill on the land portion that the single-apartment exemption may not cover. Nothing is decided, and the matter now sits with the Supreme Court. Anyone holding a Mehir LaMishtaken unit should have the tax position checked by a real estate tax lawyer rather than assume either outcome.

Indictment over extortion at Tel Aviv building sites

Police and prosecutors moved this week against an alleged protection racket targeting contractors. An indictment names three defendants, including members of the Dakah crime family and an individual from a Bedouin community in the Negev, over an extortion scheme that collected protection payments from construction companies and centered on a major Tel Aviv project. According to the charges, enforcers riding electric scooters threatened that things would end badly for those who refused to pay. An earlier raid by the police economic-crime unit arrested several suspects and seized cash, vehicles, and assets.

The case fits a wider pattern of organized crime pressing into construction, with similar indictments in the north and south in recent months. Prosecutors have stressed a common thread: criminal groups are exploiting the financial distress of builders, who make softer targets when cash is tight.

Safety regulator threatens to halt high-rise cranes

The Labor Ministry’s Safety Administration is demanding new standards for the climbing tower cranes mounted at the top of high-rises during construction, and has threatened to shut them down, with officials warning that 100 tons could fall on people’s heads. Builders argue the new requirements are hard to meet and would freeze work at many tall-building sites.

The fight is not new. The industry has pushed for years to use ground-based remote crane operation, an Israeli technology that keeps operators near shelters rather than in a cab dozens of meters up, and the regulator has declined to approve even a pilot. An idle crane costs a builder on the order of 30,000 shekels a month before lost labor, so a shutdown threat lands hard in an already weak market. The dispute adds yet more delay risk to high-rise and urban-renewal timelines.

Ramat HaSharon: appeals committee overrides the city on Ta’as cleanup

In an unusual planning move, an appeals committee stepped into the shoes of the Ramat HaSharon local committee and approved four permits to build a treatment facility for contaminated groundwater at the former Ta’as military-industries site. The committee found that the municipality’s refusal had caused public harm by delaying the cleanup.

The decision matters because the Ta’as site is one of the country’s most complex contaminated-land redevelopments, slated over time for tens of thousands of homes across Ramat HaSharon, Herzliya, Hod HaSharon, and the South Sharon. Approving the cleanup infrastructure is a step toward releasing that land, though it remains a long-term story rather than near-term supply.

Money is still flowing, just more selectively

Not every corner of the market is frozen. Real estate firm Ram Mughrabi Arditi reported about 160 million shekels of demand in the institutional stage of its first-ever bond series, from which it plans to raise about 76 million shekels. In non-bank lending, Ruby Capital completed a financing package of about a quarter of a billion shekels for a 141-member purchasing group in Beitar Illit, a city near Jerusalem.

The pattern is that capital has not disappeared, but it now favors stronger sponsors, secured projects, and structured deals rather than easy credit.

Around the country

A few more items from the week worth a buyer’s attention:

  • First hotel at Ben Gurion Airport. The national licensing authority approved an eight-story hotel beside Terminal 3, above the new baggage-screening building, advanced by the Airports Authority. Construction is expected around 2028.
  • Givat Olga, Hadera. A coastal neighborhood first built as immigrant housing in the 1950s is being reframed as an investor magnet, on the strength of sea proximity and renewal, even as national investor demand stays weak.
  • Kiryat Tiv’on pushback. A plan for about 1,400 apartments in buildings up to ten stories has drawn fierce local opposition in the low-rise town, with residents saying the authorities arrived with bulldozers for a place that needs to be worked with tweezers.
  • Modiin’s new center. The Dam HaMakabim business district is drawing strong demand for apartments and offices, though some shop owners complain there is little to do there but eat.
  • Talbiya, Jerusalem. The prestige neighborhood remains sought after for its heritage homes and cultural institutions, but residents note it carries some of the highest municipal tax rates in the country.
  • Industry move. Amir Ashavi, a lawyer and former chief executive of the Kiryat Ono development corporation, was named head of the renovation contractors’ association, taking over at a hard moment for the building trade.

What it means for buyers

For an English-speaking buyer, this week reinforced a single theme. Demand has collapsed, builders are under real cash pressure, and the genuine discounts are hidden in financing terms and private negotiation rather than the asking price. That gives a prepared buyer unusual room to push on price, terms, and timing. Two cautions stand out from the week’s news: treat any 20-80 or balloon offer as a math problem rather than a gift, since the large payment falls due the day the home is ready, and have the tax position checked before relying on any subsidized apartment while the Ashdar appeal is unresolved.

Foreign buyers remain a small presence, just 77 purchases in the whole country in April, about half of them American, so the field is quiet and competition from other overseas buyers is light.

Sources

Sales and inventory figures come from the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Finance Ministry and are rounded. The roughly 11% financing-incentive value is our own estimate from the stated deal terms, shown so readers can check it. This briefing is general market information, not legal, tax, or mortgage advice.

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Written by Chaim Semerenko and the Semerenko Group team
Founder and CEO, Semerenko Group

Semerenko Group makes Israeli real estate clear for English-speaking buyers, renters, olim, and investors, and connects serious clients with the right licensed professionals.

Published by Semerenko Group under the professional supervision of licensed Israeli real-estate broker Pinhas Menachem Reiss (License #324150). We provide information, technology, and introductions. Not legal, tax, or financial advice.

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