Real Estate Market in Argentina and the Housing Deficit – 2025

Historical Context: Real Estate as Argentina’s Traditional Store of Value

Real estate has historically functioned as Argentina’s primary hedge against inflation, remaining a fully dollarized market since the 1970s.

Price Cycles by Administration

• 1976–1981 (Videla): Property prices rise initially, then fall toward the end of the military dictatorship.

• 1983–1989 (Alfonsín): Prices decline.

• 1989–1995 (Menem I): Strong price growth.

• 1995–1999 (Menem II): Prices stabilize.

• 1999–2001 (De la Rúa): Market collapses in 2001.

• 2002–2003 (Duhalde): Prices rebound.

• 2003–2007 (Néstor Kirchner): Prices continue rising.

• 2007–2015 (Cristina Fernández de Kirchner): Continued upward trend.

• 2015–2017 (Mauricio Macri): Last cycle of marked price increases.

• 2018–2023 (Alberto Fernández): Sharp market contraction beginning in 2018, with prices falling 50% and bottoming out in 2023.

• 2023–Present (Javier Milei): Property values have already increased by approximately 20% in just two years.

Long-Term Behavior

From 1977 to today, only two major crashes in price per square meter have occurred:

• the early 1980s crisis, and

• the 2001/02 collapse.

Even during periods of peso appreciation, property prices have remained stable due to persistent structural housing demand.

Regulatory and Historical Dynamics

During the Perón era, Argentina became a stronghold of tenant protection: maintaining contracts, preventing evictions, and imposing historically low rental rates.

Paradoxically, the liberalization of rental income, advance payments, and dollar-denominated leases emerged during the last civic-military dictatorship. By 1982, nearly all real estate transactions in the country were dollarized—one year before the return to democracy.

Who Owns Property in Argentina Today?

Between the 1960s and 1990s, accessing home ownership was considerably easier for middle-class families due to:

• high wages relative to construction and land costs,

• accessible mortgage credit in certain cycles,

• rapid private-sector development, and

• availability of urban land.

Multiple-property ownership became common as a strategy to preserve wealth in an inflationary economy.

Today, 68% of owners inherited their homes, while only 32% purchased them.

Origins of the Housing Deficit

A home is more than a physical asset—it carries symbolic value, conferring stability, identity, and social legitimacy. Limited access therefore produces long-term social exclusion.

Argentina’s housing deficit stems from a convergence of structural factors:

• Wages increasingly misaligned with real estate prices,

• Chronic underinvestment from the private sector,

• Inefficient or absent urban planning,

• High and rigid construction and development costs,

• A banking system unwilling to fund long-term mortgage credit, and

• Savers’ lack of trust in long-term financial instruments tied to housing.