Rents up 10% in two years

The summer's social protest had no effect on the trend.

The Central Bureau of Statistics in Israel reports that the percentage of renters rose from 27% of the population in 1995 to 34% in 2008. High home prices, and the fact that most Israelis prefer to live in the center of the country, have caused renting to become increasingly prevalent.
The low supply of homes, including rental homes, is driving up rents. Moreover, the current measure to temporarily exempt the sale of second apartments from the betterment tax, is inadvertently liable to aggravate the shortage of rental apartments by reducing the inventory of second apartments that are rented out by their investor/owners.

A further aggravation :the supply of public housing has fallen over the years as the result of government campaigns to sell these apartments to their tenants, whilst not building new ones.

Only 15% of rental contracts quoted in US$

Israelis have increasingly followed the call of Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer to stop fixing the prices of apartment rentals in dollars over the past two years as a result of the weakening of the greenback. "In the last two years rental agreements have switched from quoting dollar prices to prices in shekel," said Bank of Israel economists in a report to be published in the forthcoming Recent Economic Developments issue.Until 2007 contracts quoting dollar prices constituted about 90 percent of rental contracts; today the figure is 15%.In reaction to the highinflation era of the 1980s, Israelis began to quote prices of various items on the domestic market in dollars. In the housing market this practice continued for years even after inflation had fallen, until the recent fall in the dollar's value.