Yields are compressing. The brochures haven't caught up.

The trend

Prices have continued to rise without a proportional rise in rents. Average daily rental rates fell in Q1 2026 even as purchase prices climbed in both the primary and secondary segments. This is ordinary behaviour for a resort city entering its build-out phase — and the opposite of what most sales material implies.

Why every source quotes a different number

Search for returns in Batumi and you will be told, depending on the page, that you can expect anywhere from 5% to 25%. All of these figures have been published within the last eighteen months. All describe the same city. They are not lies; they measure different things, and the thing being measured is rarely stated.

Four distinctions account for almost the entire spread. Gross versus net — net runs 1.5 to 2 points lower once management, maintenance and vacancy are counted. Short-let versus long-let — well-run short-let units in prime locations can still reach 8–10% gross, while long-term residential sits nearer 6–8%. Peak-season extrapolation — annualising a July nightly rate produces the 15–25% figures that circulate widely; they describe a month, not a year. And vintage — yields of 10–12% were genuinely common in 2022 and 2023, so those pages are not wrong, they are old, and they are still ranking.

What it means for a buyer today

A buyer paying $2,000 per square metre for a central primary-market unit now needs materially stronger occupancy and higher nightly rates to reach the return a 2023 buyer got at a lower entry price. The yield remains competitive against deposits in stable currencies. It is no longer competitive against the version of Batumi described in most brochures.

The useful question to put to a developer is not what yield they project. It is which of the four definitions above they are using, and what occupancy assumption sits underneath it.

Related

• Tax — what a non-resident owner actually pays
• Batumi