On street hoardings and television screens, a new campaign by real estate company Azorim has stood out recently. The company is offering apartment buyers a NIS 1 million interest-free, unlinked loan with no repayments for ten years.
This is one of the most prominent moves in a new wave of creative special financing offers from developers aiming to revive demand in the real estate market and bring back cautious buyers. What other offers have developers come up with in the past few weeks? Will these offers succeed in getting demand moving again? What lies behind them?
In Azorim’s offer, the buyer in effect receives a mortgage from the developer itself. The benefit could be worth up to NIS 500,000.
Azorim is able to obtain better terms from the financing bank than the apartment purchaser. Afte ten years, the purchaser repays the loan to the company, and thus saves the cost of financing a mortgage over the period. How can the company ensure that it will receive the money? The purchaser undergoes a regulatory check by the financing bank to make sure that he is capable of repaying the sum to Azorim at the end of the loan period.
Return on capital, assured purchase price, and more
Alongside Azorim, several companies have come out with similar offers around the country. City Boy of the Yuvalim group is enabling purchasers in its luxury projects in Tel Aviv to receive a 5% return on their equity until the apartment is handed over, for apartments costing NIS 3,390,000 or more. The company said that the benefit could be worth hundreds of thousands of shekels, depending on the price of the apartment and the purchaser’s equity, and the offer is valid until the end of the year, and for a limited number of apartments only.
The company says that the offer comes against a background of expectations of a decline in interest rates in the coming months, and the fact that the banks are already taking this into account and have started reducing interest rates on customer deposits. “In this way, Yuvalim City Boy offers buyers the possibility of benefiting from a high, fixed, certain return on the advance payment made when they bought the apartment,” says Ran Belinkis, founder and controlling shareholder in Yuvalim City Boy.
Another example is the “Hanachala” project of America Israel in the Moshava neighborhood of Tiberias, consisting of luxury semi-detached houses with gardens. America Israel is offering to cover the purchaser’s mortgage repayments for the first year “which is characterized by high moving costs,” the company says.
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Kata Group is undertaking to buyers of apartments in all eighteen of its projects currently on sale that if a similar apartment in the same project is sold for a lower price, they will receive the difference. This, the company says, is intended “to give buyers peace of mind and confidence at a time when the real estate market is characterized by volatility and uncertainty.”
“Developers trying to offload surplus supply
What really lies behind these and other special offers? The developers say that the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip has led to a revival in demand. “Buyers who were waiting for a greater level of certainty are coming down off the fence and returning to the market, fearing renewed price rises, and in the expectation that mortgages will become cheaper,” explains Raz Schrieber, CEO of Inhouse Real Estate Marketing. “Optimism is rising, and we as marketing people are seeing a significant rise in the number of leads and of sales meetings, and we are also seeing deals actually being signed. The feeling is that the market is starting to change, and we’re looking ahead.”
Prof. Yair Duchin of the Hebrew University Business School says, however, that in his opinion the special offers represent desperate attempts by developers and contractors to sell apartments in the light of their large unsold stocks. “The contractors and developers are looking for all kinds of ways of circumventing what the Bank of Israel restricts or doesn’t restrict and are finding all kinds of ideas and tricks to persuade people to buy homes. They are inventing all kinds of moves that recall offers that we have seen in the past. For example, when the city of Modi’in was built, the contractors offered a free car to anyone who bought an apartment.”
Prof. Duchin also makes the point that the contractors are relying too much on interest rate cuts by the Bank of Israel, which are expected to begin this month. “You have to realize that at the beginning the Bank of Israel will cut its interest rate only by 0.25%. It will take time before the interest rate falls to a level that will lead to greater demand.” He also says that in his view home prices will have to fall for at least the next two years, given that the supply of homes is at an all-time high.
An important question is whether and how the new marketing moves will be reflected in the Central Bureau of Statistics’ Home Price Index. The developers are careful not to present them as a direct reduction in price, but as “financing solutions” meant to make things easier for the buyer without affecting the official price of the home and the image of price stability in the market. The Central Bureau of Statistics recently began to take special offers into account in calculating the price index, and offers of the kind described here should enter its calculations.
“Just as we have recently seen at the Central Bureau of Statistics that they have begun to factor in the 20-80 (20% down payment, 80% on handover) offers in the Home Price Index, in my opinion they will also take other financing offers into account. These offers will thus be very clearly reflected in the index.”
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on November 10, 2025.
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