Real Estate: Where to buy the best apartment for investment in Europe?

Buying an apartment intended for rent in Spain offers the fastest return for an investor. Athens follows with an ROI of over 21 years for a rental apartment. Behind it are large cities in other Central and Southern European countries, with the highest return on investment offered in Vienna at 39 years.

The surprise of Heraklion

Figures from Heraklion showed the biggest rise in yields in a year, due to a dramatic rise in apartment prices in the Cretan capital. European brokerage ProfitLevel compared market prices and rents in 17 attractive metropolises in Central and Southern Europe, including seaside resorts, in its Apartment Return On Investment Comparison program.

“Apartment prices, and therefore rents, have been greatly affected by the pandemic. A year ago, we detected a significant increase in demand for investment apartments. And although apartment prices in Europe have increased, albeit slightly, in the vast majority of cases, market rents have increased faster over the past year,” explained Lucia Žárská, analyst at ProfitLevel, adding: “The rapid increase of apartment prices continued among the destinations we monitored, mainly in Crete and also in Marseille, France.’

The data is based on crowd-sourced data from Numbeo.com, which has over 100 data points for the last 12 months, even for small cities. The data was collected on January 6, 2023. The rents captured are in the category of one-bedroom apartments in the city center. Listed apartment prices are per square meter in the city center. The yield is only an example and is calculated as the ratio of the market price of the apartment to the market rent.