Residential real estate market shows sharp recovery since turn of the year

• But in commercial property sector, properties advertised drop significantly
• Quoted prices also drop by about 13%

The local real estate sector is showing signs of recovery from the setback witnessed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with improved in​terest ​in residential properties observed among potential investors, revealed LankaPropertyWeb.

Analysing website traffic, the property portal said that in January the number of visits to its website increased by 20 percent, and the number of leads generated for advertisers improved ​​by 23 percent Year-on-Year (YoY).

Web traffic analysis on a monthly basis showed that January 2021 had 22 percent more leads compared to the 20 percent leads generated in December 2020.

“Since the turn of the year there has been an increase in real estate activity by property buyers and sellers,” affirmed LankaPropertyWeb in a statement to the media.

The browsing pattern on the website also showed that January 2021 saw the highest number of visitors to the site since the start of the pandemic, indicating the possible recovery in the real estate sector.

A similar trend was also observed in house.lk, which saw a 26 percent increase in its visits in January 2021 compared to the December 2020. House.lk too reported an all-time high number of visits to the site in January of this year. 

LankaPropertyWeb attributed the increase in interest in real estate to the easing of COVID-19 restrictions, which has led to confidence returning to the market. 

“Property buyers are increasingly positive over closing sales since the start of this year,” it said.

Recently published data by LankaPropertyWeb showed that only 8 percent of its 63,250 advertisers had reduced the quoted prices during 2020, where an average reduction of 11 percent was observed. 

It shared that while 88 percent of property advertisers did not change their quoted price, 4 percent of the advertisers increased their initial tagged price by 12 percent. 

“This shows that despite the pandemic, the real estate market in Sri Lanka has remained stable last year,” stated LankaPropertyWeb.

However, trends in commercial properties are observed to be moving in the opposite direction as the number of properties advertised dropped significantly. The quoted prices also dropped by about 

13 percent. According to the property portal, the reduced interest was due to price fluctuations and the shift to working from home policies, which many businesses were pushed to embrace.