Today’s Price Is Not a Peak. It Is a Floor.

Almost every conversation about property price looks in the wrong direction. People watch the headline number and the mood of the moment, and almost nobody looks at the one side that actually sets the limit on how low a new launch can ever go: the developer’s own cost of building it. And that cost only moves one way. Across the market, the construction cost index has climbed around five percent in a single year. Raw materials for residential projects are up roughly eight to nine percent, some trades far more, with mechanical and cooling systems sitting more than forty percent above where they were a few years ago. Materials alone make up close to sixty percent of a project’s total cost, and developer margins are already thin, somewhere between eight and twelve percent. This is the quiet arithmetic underneath every launch price, and it explains something most buyers never have explained to them.

A developer cannot sell below what it costs to build plus a slim margin. That is not a choice, it is a floor. And that floor has risen every single year. The entry price in 2023 was lower than in 2024. 2024 was lower than 2025. 2025 was lower than 2026. This is not a lucky streak, it is the cost of building doing exactly what it always does. What most people experienced as a pleasant surprise was really just the floor quietly rising underneath them. You bought, you waited, and two years later your asset was worth more, and you told yourself the market had rewarded a good bet. But it was never really a bet. It was a floor behaving like a floor, and the people who understood that were not surprised at all.

Here is why this moment is different, and stronger. What used to feel like a wager is now calculable. In 2023 you bought on conviction and let the market surprise you. From 2026 forward you no longer need the surprise, because the drivers are measurable. You can see the construction costs rising in hard numbers. You can see that new launches have to be priced off those higher costs, not yesterday’s. You can see that the pipeline of new projects has collapsed, which means less future supply to soften the floor. The projection is no longer hope, it is arithmetic, and the signal has never been this clear. That is exactly why the smart money is not waiting. It is securing the 2026 floor now, while it is still the floor, because every year of waiting buys the same apartment off a higher cost base, in a market where the best locations are already gone. Waiting is quietly one of the most expensive investments there is. You pay for it not in a visible loss, but in the higher price you are forced to accept later for the opportunity you could have taken today.

For years the market rewarded the ones who guessed right. Now it rewards the ones who can read. The floor is called 2026, the signal has never been stronger, and the only question left is whether you secure it while it is still the floor, or pay for it once it becomes the next one up.