Tirana, the only coastal capital in the Western Balkans: why it needs a new framework for the affordability debate

by Besart Ruka (Tirana)

Every time a figure on Tirana apartment prices enters circulation, the comparison that immediately surfaces is Belgrade, Skopje, Sarajevo, or Pristina. Fair enough. All six capitals share related history, similar banking systems, salaries in a comparable range. But it is a comparison that stops at the surface. Tirana is the only capital in the Western Balkans within half an hour of the sea. It has a Mediterranean climate. And it sits inside a national tourism market that this year received 12.47 million visitors. If we open the debate without these three facts in the background, we end up where it has generally stalled: on the absolute figure, with no context, and without the tools to understand why the market is behaving the way it is.

The moment of divergence. The Keydata index, which uses 2005 as its base year with a value of 100, registered 251 at the end of 2023. In early 2024 it passed 276. In the second quarter of 2025 it reached 334.61. Within sixteen months, prices rose by roughly a third.

If we extend the horizon, the pattern becomes clearer. The average gross salary in Albania moved from 40,500 lekë per month in 2014 to 83,906 lekë in the second quarter of 2025. A nominal rise of 107 percent. Apartment prices also doubled in nominal terms during the same period. But the two curves did not move at the same pace. Until 2022, they followed almost parallel paths. The acceleration that followed, both in prices and in wages, is a post-pandemic phenomenon. Something changed for the city after that date, and any analysis that fails to examine this moment passes over the most important part of the story.

Where Tirana stands within the region. Here are the current prices. The Keydata index for June 2025 places the average price of an apartment in Tirana at around 1,830 euros per square meter, while the Deloitte report puts it at 2,000. In Belgrade, the average price recorded by the Republički geodetski zavod for the third quarter of 2025 is 2,517 euros per square meter for new builds and 2,560 for resales. In Pristina, the city center has reached around 2,380, with sought-after areas exceeding 2,500. In Sarajevo, new construction in the center moves around 2,100, and Stari Grad reaches 2,326. In Podgorica, new construction stands at around 2,140. In Skopje, the average price comes close to Tirana, around 1,810, although the most sought-after areas are climbing toward 3,000.

So Tirana sits somewhere in the middle. More expensive than Skopje only as a simple average. Cheaper than Belgrade, Sarajevo, Pristina, and Podgorica. Within the Balkan group, this is not the position of a uniquely expensive market. What separates Tirana from this group is not the price level. It is the factors that are displacing the market, factors the other five capitals do not have at the same intensity.

Geography. Five of the six capitals in the conventional comparison sit deep inland. Belgrade, Skopje, Sarajevo, and Pristina are four to six hours from the nearest sea, with cold winters, hot summers, and modest tourism economies. Podgorica has access to the Adriatic within forty-five minutes, but Montenegro as a whole received about 3 million visitors in 2025. A quarter of Albania’s volume.

Tirana sits thirty minutes from Durrës, three hours from Saranda. Rinas Airport closed 2025 with 11.6 million passengers, compared to 3.3 million in 2019. According to Airports Council International, it is the fastest-growing airport in Europe after the pandemic. Mediterranean climate, access to the coast, position as the gateway to a country with 450 kilometers of coastline. Together they pull Tirana away from the continental Balkan group and place it in a different one, where it meets Athens, Valencia, Split, and Lisbon.

The Mediterranean comparison. In Athens, the average apartment price sits at around 2,480 euros per square meter. In Valencia, 2,800. In Lisbon, 4,200. In Split, above 3,500. Tirana at 1,830 euros per square meter is cheaper than any of them. As an absolute level, this is not an expensive category. But the absolute level is rarely the whole story.

Once you shift the comparison from the Balkans toward the Mediterranean, a question arises that the Albanian debate has barely formulated. The question is not whether Tirana is more expensive than Belgrade. The question is how to manage a market that has gone Mediterranean inside a country still building convergence with the European Union. Athens, Lisbon, and Barcelona have had decades to develop the institutions, taxes, and public housing stock that accompany a tourism economy. Tirana is entering the same market profile, but much faster, and without the runway they had. That is the difference that deserves a new conversation, not a comparison table with Belgrade.

Three structures that make Tirana unique. Foreign visitors to Albania have grown from 4.2 million in 2021 to 12.47 million in 2025. Italians make up about a quarter, Kosovars 16 percent, Germans 6. North Macedonia moves between 1.2 and 1.5 million visitors per year. Bosnia, 1.5. Kosovo, under one million. This is not just a difference in numbers. It is a difference in kind. The housing market of a country that receives 12 million visitors does not resemble that of a country that receives one.

The diaspora, the second actor, we know well. More than 1.7 million Albanians live abroad, mainly in Italy, Greece, Germany, the United Kingdom. Those who buy in Tirana rarely buy to live in. They buy to hold capital, for a holiday home, or to return one day that may never come. None of the other five capitals sees its diaspora deploying capital at the same intensity. Sarajevo has a substantial history of emigration, but the share of it that actively buys in the capital is noticeably smaller. Skopje has a large Macedonian diaspora, but its capacity to buy in the metropolis is more limited. Tirana finds itself in a position where the diaspora pays in euros, often cash, and competes directly with the family that stays inside the country.

The third factor is the non-resident foreign buyer. The Bank of Albania, in an analysis from 2024, reported that around a third of the apartments sold in the country were purchased by foreign buyers. This contribution added 24.5 percent to prices between 2020 and the end of 2023. No other capital in the region carries a comparable weight of non-resident buyers.

Taken together, these three factors are not a judgment on what is happening. They are a description of the structure that has shifted Tirana from one market category into another.

What is missing from the usual picture. Every city that crosses into this type of market eventually develops the analytical tools that go with the pressure. Some of these tools, in the Albanian debate, are still insufficiently developed.

The payment structure is one. According to the Bank of Albania survey for the first half of 2025, around half of housing sales are carried out through bank credit. The rest is cash. In developed Mediterranean markets the cash share is lower. What does this mean? That interest rates and monetary policy influence prices only partially, because half of the market moves outside the banking system. This is not a moral diagnosis. It is a technical characteristic, and it deserves study.

Vacant stock is another. Reports published in 2025 suggest that Tirana has a high number of uninhabited apartments, held either as investment assets or as holiday properties used a few weeks a year. The same has happened in Athens, Lisbon, and Barcelona, and has stood at the center of housing reforms in each of those cities. The Albanian data is still limited. A detailed census of the housing stock would be a good starting point. Without it, the debate continues to take place without numbers.

The closing question. Tirana is not a classic speculative bubble. The markets it now behaves like, Athens, Lisbon, Split, have held high prices for decades without collapse, because supply meets real demand coming from tourism, the diaspora, international capital. But the absence of a bubble is not automatic evidence that the market is healthy for the local population. A market can avoid collapse and at the same time be strained for the majority that produces it.

What, then, does a country like ours deserve? Not a comparison table with Belgrade. Not a single figure loaded with accusations. Nor a formal defense of the status quo. But a public conversation that begins from what Tirana has become, and holds the analytical honesty that Athens and Lisbon are themselves still learning. Those cities have two decades of experience with the pressure that has just arrived here. There is enough to learn from them, and perhaps something to teach them tomorrow, when we have built our own instruments.

As long as we keep the debate inside the Balkan category, we will continue to hold the wrong questions in our hands. The market, meanwhile, will keep responding to its own mechanics, without waiting for our public vocabulary to catch up.