The Real estate transactions in the Sultanate collapsed 30.3% year-on-year in the first quarter of the current year, with the total traded value of properties standing at RO 922.1 million as against RO 1.32 billion recorded last year, according to the latest report issued by the National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI).
Fees collected by way of legal proceedings in the real estate sector increased 23.7% in the first quarter to touch RO 14.6 million compared with RO 11.8 million last year.
Traded value of sales contracts, on the other hand, posted a growth of 4.9% to RO 297.1 million from last year’s RO 283.3 million, while the number of sales contracts saw a marginal increase of 0.3% to 20,963 as against 20,894 contracts in 2015.
Meanwhile, traded value of mortgage contracts slumped 40.2% to RO 619.1 million from last year’s RO 1.03 billion, even as the number of contracts went up 31.5% to 6,969 compared with 5,300 mortgage contracts in the first quarter of 2015.
Traded value of barter contracts logged a significant 59.5% growth to touch RO 5.9 million as against RO 3.7 million last year, while their numbers increased 24.1% to 428, from 345 barter contracts in the same quarter of last year.
In all, 71,021 properties were issued in the first quarter, marking a rise of 14.7% over last year’s 61,918 issued properties. However, the quarter witnessed a 39.5% decline in the number of properties issued to GCC nationals, which fell from 806 properties in Q1, 2015, to 488 properties during the same quarter of the current year, the NCSI report indicates.