Tenders for 3,091 Israeli Homes Never Opened for Bids

The state’s land-tender machine is slipping, and nobody has announced it. Our own check of every Israel Land Authority tender record this morning found 10 tenders for 1,247 homes that are scheduled to close between August 3 and August 10 but were never actually opened for bids. A separate 1,260-home tender in Ashkelon missed its July 29 opening date in silence. Three more tenders for 584 homes were supposed to open today and had no bid books as of 07:00. That is 3,091 homes in limbo, our count, from official records.

The morning papers brought two big lottery stories. TheMarker counted 1,109 families who won subsidized apartments years ago while their developers never even applied for a building permit, across 28 projects stuck three years or more. And Calcalist reported that the discount-lottery program itself has quietly changed shape: a court ruling now bars draft evaders, and new Finance Ministry rules push future lotteries out of the expensive center. In Jerusalem, a 185 square meter duplex penthouse at Mishkenot Ha’uma sold for NIS 12.25 million, a record for the project, to a buyer from Los Angeles.

Tuesday, August 5 is the real date to watch: 7,390 homes across 12 verified-open tenders close in a single day, led by a 2,868-home mega-tender in Sderot.

Tenders for 1,247 homes are about to close. They never opened.

This is our own finding from the Israel Land Authority’s tender database, checked record by record this morning. No news outlet has reported it.

The public tender list shows dozens of housing tenders “open for bids” with closing dates next week. But when you pull each tender’s official detail record, 10 of them carry a different message: the tender has not yet opened, and no bid booklet has been published. A builder could not bid on these homes today if it wanted to. All 10 are scheduled to close between August 3 and August 10.

The pattern is wider than these 10. The biggest single case is tender 489/2025 in Ashkelon, the “Golf” compound, with 1,260 homes. It was scheduled to open for bids on July 29. It did not, and its record has not been updated since May 18. Three more tenders were scheduled to open today, August 2: Ar’ara BaNegev (266 homes), Rahat (207 homes), and Oranit (111 homes, a tender first numbered in 2019 and now revived). As of 07:00 this morning none of the three had a published bid book. Eight commercial and tourism tenders in Yeruham, Arad, the Central Arava and the Dead Sea area missed their July 30 openings the same way.

Two figures we computed ourselves from the official records, so you can recheck the math. First, 3,091 homes now sit in this silent limbo: 1,247 in the never-opened closers, 1,260 in Ashkelon Golf, and 584 in today’s three no-show openings. Second, about 13 percent of all the housing in tenders due to close between August 3 and August 10 (1,247 of 9,678 homes) sits in tenders no builder can bid on.

For scale, the tenders that ARE running are large. On Tuesday, August 5, twelve verified-open tenders close in one day, together holding 7,390 homes. The largest is Sderot’s TML 1121 South with 2,868 homes, followed by two Ofakim tenders (1,002 and 544 homes) and two in Safed (618 and 150). This is separate from the July cancellation wave, in which the state formally cancelled tenders for 5,823 homes. That story, including Jerusalem’s 664-home Givat Masua tender, is already told in our July tender report. What is new here is quieter: tenders that were never cancelled and never opened, just left to drift past their own dates.

Source: Israel Land Authority tender database, list and per-tender detail records, checked August 2 at 07:00 to 07:20.

Why it matters: if you are waiting for one of these projects, or pricing land nearby, the published closing date is not the real signal. Check whether the bid book actually exists before you plan around a tender.

1,109 winners, and the builder never asked for a permit

A TheMarker reporter opened his Sunday investigation with a confession: he won a discount-apartment lottery on February 25, 2024. Almost two and a half years later, the winning builders on his project, Reisdor and Sh. Elroy, have not filed a request for a building permit. He and 206 other winners are still waiting to be called to pick an apartment.

His project is not the exception. TheMarker, August 2 counted 28 projects from the government lottery programs that have been stuck for more than three years. In the worst cases the wait is close to a decade. By the paper’s count, 1,109 winning families are in projects where the developer has not even applied for a permit. The reasons range from fights between developers and city halls to building companies that collapsed. The Housing Ministry answered on the record that it is “working to advance the projects with all the relevant parties.”

These numbers are TheMarker’s own tally. No official dataset of stuck lottery projects has been published, so treat the exact counts as the paper’s reporting, with the ministry’s response noted. The problem itself is one our lottery pitfalls page has warned about in general terms: winning a draw is not the same as getting a home.

Why it matters: a lottery win locks you in emotionally and financially while the clock runs. Before you count on a subsidized apartment, check whether the project has a building permit, not just a winner’s certificate.

The cheap-apartment lottery quietly became a different program

Last week’s draw of 7,922 discounted apartments was the end of an era, not just another lottery. Calcalist, August 2 lays out two structural changes that now govern the program.

First, draft evaders are out. Israel’s High Court ruled in April that the state may not give benefits to yeshiva students who have not settled their army status. In the July 26 draw, the Justice Ministry stepped in at the last minute to block their access. From now on that is the standing rule.

Second, the map shrinks. Under Finance Minister Smotrich’s rules, decided in May 2025 and now in force, lotteries will run only in towns where new homes cost up to NIS 20,000 per square meter including VAT, roughly NIS 1.8 million for an average 90 square meter four-room apartment. The discount is now 25 percent, capped at NIS 550,000. Reservists get half the apartments in national-priority areas and up to 35 percent elsewhere, up from 20 percent. Our own math on the cap: a 25 percent discount stays a full 25 percent only up to a NIS 2.2 million home (550,000 divided by 0.25). On anything pricier, the real discount rate shrinks.

Calcalist’s analysis of a decade of draws shows how sharp the cut is. Since 2016 about 143,000 apartments were raffled, and roughly 71,000 of them, half, were in the high-demand center and greater Jerusalem. Under the new price bar, cities like Rishon LeZion, Rosh HaAyin and Be’er Yaakov (about 5,000 raffled homes each), Yavne and Modi’in (about 3,500 each) and Netanya (about 3,000) fall out of the program. Beit Shemesh, second only to Ashkelon in the past decade with about 8,500 raffled homes, is priced out too, and the draft-evader rule makes new haredi-city draws politically awkward on top. Ashkelon, about 9,000 homes and still under the price bar, stays in. The rules run until December 31, 2027. By Calcalist’s count, only about half of the past decade’s lotteries would have happened under them.

Who gets priority, and how the draws work, are beats our pages already cover: see reservist priority and how the odds changed.

Why it matters: if your plan was to win a discounted apartment in a center-country city, that door is closing until at least the end of 2027. The program is becoming a periphery program, with reservists first in line.

A Jerusalem penthouse sets a quiet record: NIS 12.25 million

The deal: a 185 square meter duplex penthouse with an 80 square meter terrace on Abba Eban Street, in the Mishkenot Ha’uma project near Jerusalem’s government quarter and the Navon train station, sold for NIS 12.25 million. Globes, August 2 reports it is the highest price ever paid in the project. The buyer is a foreign resident from Los Angeles.

The backstory: the penthouse was originally planned for Yair Biton, then the controlling owner of B. Yair, the company that built this part of the project after winning Israel Land Authority tenders here in 2006 for NIS 435 million. The company’s troubles pushed the apartment onto the open market. The owners first asked NIS 14 million. The broker who closed the deal says prices in the project run NIS 39,000 to 43,000 per square meter.

Our own math: this sale works out to about NIS 66,000 per square meter (12.25 million divided by 185, terrace not counted), roughly 58 percent above the project’s average of about NIS 42,000. That average itself is up about 35 percent since 2019, per Globes. A neighboring 222 square meter duplex went for NIS 12.07 million late last year, so the price is high but not out of line for the project’s two standout apartments. One caveat: the report comes from Globes and the broker; the exact signing date of the deal was not published.

Why it matters: foreign money keeps setting the top of Jerusalem’s market, and it is doing it outside the famous luxury streets. Project records like this one reset what every seller in the building asks tomorrow.

For the site’s editors: one update, one watch, no new pages

Update to israel-approved-a-record-wave-of-homes-can-it-actually-build-them: add one line with 2025 actuals. In 2025, builders completed 59,700 homes and the housing stock grew by a net 56,100, against the state’s new target of 65,000 a year, which would need 85,000 to 90,000 yearly starts (CBS figures, via ice, August 1).

Watch, no page: the G City control-sale crisis we covered in the August 1 brief moved overnight. Per Calcalist, August 2: the parties were due to file the deal with the Competition Authority today; the buyers have NIS 20 million on deposit that is forfeited if they walk; the deal is structured as 26 percent for NIS 661 million plus 7 percent for NIS 200 million; Katzman floated a single-stage 33 percent sale, Abu wanted 10 percent off for it, Katzman refused; an insider puts the odds at “50:50.” If yesterday’s G City section is published, append these facts to it rather than writing a new piece.

Checked today and not shipped

Covered in recent briefs already: the G City crisis (August 1), the Abisror IPO analysis that ice re-ran this morning (July 31), and a Petah Tikva outlet’s re-run of the NIS 700 million Mivne data-center loan (July 30). Covered by existing pages: a rate-cut-and-mortgages explainer (our rate-cut page owns it), a Ynet arnona item repeating the 33 percent exceptional-hike figure our arnona 2027 page already carries, a Globes landlord tax explainer, a Bizportal renters’ rights guide, and a sub-NIS-2M apartment scan (our silos own all three beats). Dropped as unverified: a Facebook protest-page claim that banks’ real-estate exposure passed NIS 1 trillion (no primary source reachable, no press pickup). Dropped as single-source or out of window: the Haifa-Nazareth light rail “execution stage” item (one local outlet, no second source), Eilat’s mariculture-center plan approval (off the property beat), a Maariv feature on diaspora buyers paying cash (published an hour before our window, beat owned by our demand pages), and a West Bank demolitions item whose date could not be verified. Not news events: a TheMarker magazine feature on Jerusalem’s Nachlaot neighborhood and a Globes weekly deals column (our buyer-leverage pages own that beat). Not data: a Sde Dov YouTube commentary, a gossip column, and three housing-protest Facebook relays. Quiet on the official wires: no CBS release, no Bank of Israel statement, no Knesset committee sessions, and no ministry announcements across five gov.il feeds in the window.

Sources

Israel Land Authority tender database (list plus per-tender detail records, August 2) · TheMarker, August 2 (stalled lottery projects) · Calcalist, August 2 (lottery rules) · Globes, August 2 (Mishkenot Ha’uma deal) · Calcalist, August 2 (G City) · ice, August 1 (CBS completions) · Housing Ministry, July 27 (11th draw, 7,922 homes in 19 towns) · Bizportal, July 26 (draw figures cross-check)