TUNIS — The price index for built property in Tunisia rose 5.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared with the same quarter of 2024, according to figures from the National Institute of Statistics released this week. Over the same period, the volume of transactions fell in every category of asset the institute tracks.

Quarter on quarter, the index moved only 0.3 percent, and that small gain masks two opposite movements: houses and villas gained 1.8 percent while apartments corrected downward by 0.3 percent. Building land rose 1.9 percent over the quarter.

Year on year, the picture is uniform. Apartments were up 5.7 percent, individual houses 5.6 percent, and residential land 3.9 percent.

The Sahel is pulling the index

The regional spread is wide. Built property in the Sahel — Nabeul, Sousse, Monastir and Mahdia — rose 6.9 percent over twelve months, more than twice the 2.9 percent recorded in Greater Tunis. For building land, the annual increases were 4.8 percent in Greater Tunis, 5.3 percent in the Sahel and 3.6 percent in the Sfax and southern zone. The North West went the other way, with residential land prices down 1.1 percent.

That divergence matters because it separates two different markets. Coastal governorates absorb tourism-linked demand, purchases by Tunisians living abroad and secondary residences; the interior does not. The same national index therefore describes an increasingly national divide.

Prices up, buyers gone

The second half of the data is the part that should worry policymakers. Adjusted for seasonal variation, transaction volumes fell in the fourth quarter against the third across the board: building land down 2.9 percent, houses down 2.4 percent, and apartments down 4.9 percent — the sharpest fall of the three.

Rising prices alongside falling volumes is not a sign of a strong market. Writing in Managers, analyst Bassem Ennaifar reads the combination as evidence of "a clear erosion of household purchasing power and of bank financing capacity" — buyers cannot meet asking prices, and sellers are not lowering them.

The credit channel explains much of it. Tunisian housing loans are largely indexed to the money market rate, and the Central Bank held its policy rate unchanged again in July. Inflation eased to 5.1 percent that month, but borrowing costs have not fallen at the same pace, and household incomes have not caught up with three years of accumulated price increases.

What follows from the data

The two halves of the release point to different remedies, and it is worth keeping them apart. If the binding constraint is financing capacity, as Ennaifar's reading implies, then measures acting on the cost or duration of credit are what move the market. If the constraint is the price level itself, the lever is supply — and here the INS index cannot answer the question, because it does not publish the stock of completed unsold housing or the number of vacant units.

That gap is itself a policy problem. Tunisia measures property prices quarterly and property demand quarterly, but not the standing inventory that would tell buyers, builders and the state whether the country is short of housing or short of affordable housing. Those are not the same shortage, and they do not have the same solution.

The INS publishes the index quarterly. The first-quarter 2026 reading will show whether the fourth-quarter contraction was seasonal noise or the start of a trend.