Housing prices in Tehran have increased by 23% since the beginning of this year.
The Housing Planning and Economics Office of the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development says that housing prices in Tehran have increased by 23 percent in June compared to the beginning of this year and 42 percent compared to June last year.
The average housing price in June exceeded 19 million tomans per square meter. This figure was 17 million tomans in May this year and 15.5 million tomans in April. Housing prices in Iran have quadrupled since the beginning of 2018.
The rise in housing prices has destroyed renters' hopes of buying a home, and housing rental prices have also skyrocketed.
It is not clear exactly how many people in Iran are currently renting, but recently Mahmoud Mahmoudzadeh, Deputy Minister of Housing and Construction and Minister of Roads and Urban Development, announced that, based on 2016 statistics, 43.6 percent of people in Tehran are renters.
According to Mahmoudzadeh, in 7 provinces, including Tehran, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, Kermanshah, Qom, and Lorestan, the rental rate is more than 40 percent, and in 6 provinces, including Yazd, Mazandaran, and Golestan, the rental rate is less than 30 percent, and in the rest of the country's provinces, the rental rate is between 30 and 40 percent.
This price increase comes at a time when the Parliamentary Research Center recently reported a 34 percent decline in people's purchasing power over the past 10 years.
This is despite the fact that on Tuesday, the head of the Statistics Center of Iran claimed that people's income and spending last year were better than in 2018, and that the growth rate of income was faster than the growth in household spending.
His statements come amid reports that in recent days, many have been published about "the doubling of the rent for rooftops for sleeping," "the trend of two families renting one housing unit," and other such things.
The Citizen newspaper also reported on Wednesday that "young couples are selling gold and marriage loans, as well as cars, to finance housing rent."
To investigate the increase in prices in the housing rental market, the Citizen reporter visited four neighborhoods in Tehran: Rah-e-Ahan, Enghelab, Baharestan, and Navab. The result is that rental prices have increased by between 40 and 100 percent compared to 2019.
A tenant told this newspaper, "Last year at this time, you could have bought a 45-meter house in the Rah-e-Ahan neighborhood for 90 million tomans. Now, you can't even mortgage the same house with this money."
Source: Radio Farda
