Between 1 January 2023 and 26 August 2024, Cyprus issued 48,212 residence permits to third-country nationals under its tech-sector attraction strategy. The figures come from Interior Minister Constantinos Ioannou, answering a parliamentary question from Volt MP Alexandra Attalides in July 2024. Roughly 21,000 of those permits went to employees of tech companies. Just over 25,000 covered their family members. Russian citizens accounted for 33,517 of the total, with Ukraine at 3,504 and Belarus at 2,713. These people did not scatter across the island. Most went to Limassol, and they arrived on salaries that bear no relation to what the city's landlords were used to. This piece is about what that did to the housing market, and who pays for it.
The scale of the tech economy now
The numbers are large for a country of under a million people. KPMG Cyprus figures presented at the TechIsland Summit in May 2026 put the tech sector's direct contribution at €5.9 billion for 2025, or 16.2 per cent of GDP, up from 15.5 per cent the year before. Add indirect and induced effects and KPMG reaches €11.9 billion. The sector employed 48,200 people directly, 12,400 of them non-EU nationals, and supported around 79,000 jobs in all. Over the decade to 2025 the ICT sector grew at 18.9 per cent a year. The wider economy managed 7.9.
The build-up started well before the war in Ukraine. Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 pushed a first group of firms towards the island, and Belarusian companies followed after the failed protests of 2020, a history the Institute of Current World Affairs traced in its reporting on the island's Russian exiles. February 2022 turned the trickle into a corporate airlift. Limassol, already the base for the island's shipping and forex industries, took most of it.
What happened to rents
Landbank Analytics' July 2025 market snapshot, reported by the Cyprus Mail, put Limassol's average asking rent at €3,057 a month. Larnaca, forty-five minutes up the motorway, averaged €1,277. A one-bedroom flat in Limassol asked €1,651 against €1,070 in Nicosia. Two-bedroom flats averaged €2,574 and three-bedroom homes €3,812. Landbank's separate survey of houses found the average Limassol house letting for €5,099 a month. Five-bedroom properties asked €8,431.
Supply thinned while prices climbed. Apartment listings across the island fell from 3,257 in January 2025 to 1,390 by July, and Limassol held 1,013 of what remained. Nicosia, a bigger city by population, had 191 flats on the market. Growth has cooled from the earlier pace but it has not stopped. The RICS Cyprus Property Index with KPMG recorded apartment rents up 5.79 per cent year on year in Q4 2025, the largest rise of any asset class it tracks. Zoom out and the pressure is national: Eurostat data cited by Index.cy shows Cypriot rents up 30.3 per cent over the past decade against an EU average of 22 per cent.
Prices moved with them
The Central Bank of Cyprus residential property price index rose 5 per cent year on year in the third quarter of 2025. Apartments did the work, up 6.4 per cent against 2.6 per cent for houses. Limassol rose 7.1 per cent and its 1,431 sale contracts in the quarter were the most on the island, though Paphos at 8.9 per cent and Larnaca at 7.3 per cent actually grew faster, which tells you the repricing is now spilling into the cheaper districts. Sales to foreign buyers across Cyprus reached 1,827 in the quarter, up 9.3 per cent on a year earlier. The steepest climb came earlier in the cycle: the Central Bank's index had apartment prices rising 11.5 per cent year on year as late as the third quarter of 2023.
New-build figures show where the money concentrates. Landbank Analytics data, drawn from sale contracts filed with the Department of Lands and Surveys, put the average new apartment in Limassol at €372,000 in Q1 2025, up 12.4 per cent from €331,000 a year earlier and half as much again as the €247,000 national average. Realtika's 2025 price mapping has Limassol residential stock spanning €3,000 to €9,000 per square metre, with the Marina and city-centre seafront at €6,000 to €8,000. Inland it gets cheaper: Ypsonas runs €3,200 to €3,600 and Kato Polemidia €3,600 to €4,000.
Who pays for it
Cystat's preliminary figures for 2025, reported by the Cyprus Mail in April 2026, put average gross monthly earnings in Cyprus at €2,605 and the median at €1,968. Set those against Landbank's rents. A median earner taking the average Limassol one-bedroom flat at €1,651 would hand over 84 per cent of gross pay. A couple on two median wages renting the same flat still gives up 42 per cent, almost exactly the 42.4 per cent average rent-to-income ratio the European Trade Union Institute calculates for Cyprus, per Index.cy. The national minimum wage is €1,088 a month, roughly two-thirds of the asking rent on that one-bedroom flat.
The policy response is small against these numbers. The Cyprus Mail reported in November 2025 that the state housing body Koag planned 135 units for sale and 36 for rent in 2025, with 96 and 156 to follow in 2026, plus around 600 affordable apartments in the Agios Nikolaos and Agios Ioannis neighbourhoods at rents 25 to 30 per cent below market. Limassol recorded 1,431 residential sale contracts in a single quarter. Those two numbers are not on the same scale. So households on Cypriot wages move inland, to Ypsonas and Kato Polemidia, where a square metre costs roughly half what it does on the seafront.
Where yields sit for a buyer in 2026
The RICS index with KPMG put gross apartment yields across Cyprus at 5.45 per cent in Q4 2025, barely moved from 5.41 per cent a year earlier. Houses yield 2.96 per cent gross, down from 3.03, which after costs is a bet on capital growth and nothing else.
A 5.45 per cent gross yield in a eurozone market where rents are still growing at nearly 6 per cent looks decent on paper. The risks are specific, though. Tenant demand leans on one industry that did not exist at this scale four years ago and answers to geopolitics as much as to markets. Rent growth has already slowed from the double-digit years, and the Cyprus Mail noted a 1.9 per cent seasonal dip in Limassol asking rents in late 2025. The asking averages that make the city look expensive are also pulled upward by a thin band of coastal stock, the €5,099-a-month houses in Landbank's survey, that most landlords will never own. A buyer underwriting a standard two-bedroom flat in Mesa Geitonia should not be anchoring to a citywide average of €3,057.
Citywide averages are close to useless in a market this lopsided, and the distance between an asking figure and an achieved rent can take a full point off a gross yield. That is why Torquity builds rent estimates from comparable lettings rather than headline indices, and shows the confidence range around each estimate. In a market repricing this quickly, the width of that range is information in itself.
Would we buy? At the right basis, in the mid-market apartment segment, with the tenant case stress-tested against a scenario where the tech sector stops growing, the numbers still clear. What we would not do is project the 2022 to 2024 rent growth forward. That was a one-off repricing: roughly 21,000 well-paid arrivals meeting a fixed housing stock. It has already happened. The question for a buyer today is what the market looks like after it.