The Research Department at RAMCO sarl has been compiling data on the residential market in Beirut for several consecutive years: the number of residential projects being built, their total size (referred to as built-up area), their prices, their sales ratios, etc.
The evolution of this data over the last three years (2012 to 2014) reveals a sluggish demand, a decrease in the average apartment size and an increase in the unit price of unsold apartments.
The data collected is for residential buildings in Municipal Beirut completed at the end of each year between 2012 and 2014. Data was collected for projects that posted an asking price of around $3,000 per square meter (SQM) or above on the first floor, as projects within lower budgets tended to sell out off plan or relatively early in the construction process, and rarely offered reliable information on sales ratios.
Shrinking apartment sizes

The most striking finding is the drop in the average size of apartments completed between 2012 and 2014, with apartment sizes shrinking by 18 percent during this time. Apartments went from measuring 343 SQM on average in 2012 to just 283 SQM for projects completed in 2014. This is clearly reflected in an overall supply of built-up area (BUA) shrinking at a much faster pace than the total number of projects or apartments.
In parallel, the average size of apartments that were not sold in projects completed at the end of 2014 remains high. This means that larger apartments have the most difficulty in finding buyers.
In 2012 and 2013, the average size of apartments that remained unsold at the end of the year was smaller than the overall average size of apartments completed in those two years. In 2014, however, the average size of unsold apartments was about 10 percent larger than the overall average size of the total number of apartments completed during the same year.
The trend clearly points towards higher demand for smaller apartments in 2014. Smaller apartments sell faster than larger ones, which then remain on the market, dragging the curve of average sizes of unsold apartments up.