What the adverts show

On the last census day the median asking price of flats and houses was highest in Piran (€5,309/m²), Izola (€5,008) and Ljubljana (€5,004), and lowest at about €936 (Laško). 83 municipalities have the 15 or more sale adverts a median needs.

Rental adverts are scarcer: only 14 municipalities hold enough for a median. Ljubljana €17.86/m² a month, Koper €16.67, Maribor €12.28.

The two sides give a gross yield: a flat's annual asking rent divided by its asking price. In the 9 municipalities where it can be measured it runs from 3.5% (Piran) to 5.2% (Celje); Ljubljana 4.0%. Where a flat costs more, the rent does not rise as much. The yield is before costs, voids and tax, and the flat let and the flat sold are not the same flat.

In Ljubljana the asking price of a flat is highest in Trnovo (€6,699/m²) and lowest in Rudnik (€4,756). The yield runs from 3.6% to 4.7%: the dearer districts return less per euro.

The map has one more layer: registered rents, the leases filed in the real-estate transaction register for 2024. The asking rent is 1.72 to 2.07 times higher in every district. That is not a discount to bargain for, as the next part shows.

By build year the asking price of flats and houses runs from €2,147/m² to €3,297/m², 1.54 times. But new flats are built where flats are already dear. Compare each advert with its own municipality's median and the span shrinks to 0.92 to 1.11, 1.21 times: about 61% of the new-build premium is location.

Two things survive, and neither is about age. Small is dear per square metre: a new flat under 40 m² is 1.59 of its municipality's median, a large house from the seventies 0.79. And buildings from before 1946 are the cheapest to buy within their municipality (0.92) while being among the dearest to rent: the old flat in the centre. Pick what to show.

A house in energy class A asks 40 percentage points more than one in class F or G, compared with houses of the same municipality and size. Compared also with houses built in the same period, 9 points remain. About 78% of the premium is the building's age, not its class.

Flats are the same: 23 points without age, 4 with it. The class is the advertiser's statement, and many leave it out; those adverts are the diamond in the chart.

For a Ljubljana flat the median asking rent is €18.43/m² a month, and the median registered lease for 2024 €9.62. It looks like a gap to bargain over. It is not: 74% of registered leases fall below the adverts' tenth percentile. The two registers barely overlap.

An advert is a market letting offered to strangers. A registered lease is every letting that reaches the tax authority: within families, non-profit, an old tenancy renewed. They are two populations, not two prices of the same flat.

Nor is the ratio one number. The same Ljubljana sale adverts are 2.98 times the deals of 2014, 1.56 times those of 2024 and 2.09 times all years pooled. Against all years the gap is mostly price growth. Across municipalities the sale ratio runs from 0.70 to 2.53 (median 1.32, 49 municipalities) and is higher where houses dominate the adverts.

Leases reach the register over up to two years. The ones that arrive first are dearer. A year that is still filling therefore holds only the dearer half of itself.

Over six settled years the median at first publication was on average 22% higher than the level the year settled at. 2024 read €7.47 per m² when first published; today, with 15,902 leases in instead of 1,186, it reads €6.14. The market did not move; cheaper leases arrived.

For 2025 and 2026 this means their median rents will fall by about 18% over the next year. Never compare a fresh year with a settled one.

Are asking prices falling? The answer depends on how it is measured, and over one month three ways disagree.

The same adverts, day on day: between −0.5% and +0.3% in every sale segment and every region over 40 days. 1% to 27% of sale adverts changed their price at all; the median cut was −7.6%.

The stock median moves more, and often the other way. Ljubljana flats for sale: median +3.8%, scored against their own cell +1.8%, the same adverts −0.1%. The gap is who arrived: new adverts are smaller, and small is dearer per square metre. A month-on-month stock median measures the mix.

Pick a segment.

On 973 rental flats the landlord marked that the flat also suits students. In Ljubljana that stock shrank by −34% to 11 Oct 2026, the other rental flats by −4%. Within two weeks of posting 72% of student adverts were gone, against 56% of the rest.

A student flat is a different product: 36 m² against 55 m², €16.85 per m² against €15.00, 94% private landlords against 62%. When they leave, the median moves by mix alone: in Ljubljana it fell −5.3%, and −3.4% without the student adverts.

The mark is the landlord's willingness, never the tenant. Nothing here says who moved in.

An advert that disappears may be sold, let, withdrawn or expired; from outside these are four identical events. Even so, the speed of leaving is worth something.

Of 7,447 adverts posted during the censuses, 46% of rental and 19% of sale adverts were gone within a fortnight. Flats to let leave fastest, business premises for sale slowest. The gap between segments is a property of the window: over three days the fastest is 23.9 times the slowest, over four weeks 3.8 times, because the fast segment runs out of fast adverts. Pick a window.

What leaves fast is smaller. Flats for sale gone within a week had a total price 0.85 of those still listed, and a price per m² 1.07. So the median of adverts reads the price per m² fairly and the typical total high.

Private adverts leave faster than agency ones, but that is not an outcome: a private seller buys an advert for a fixed period, an agency holds it on a subscription.

Private sellers post 21% of all live adverts, but the share belongs to the market, not the country: from 82% of garages to let and 60% of flats to let to 6% of business premises for sale. The more standard the thing, the more people advertise it themselves.

The share falls with size: on the rent side from 78% under 40 m² to 16% for the largest flats.

Does a private seller ask less? Paired within the same municipality and size, a private landlord asks 0.89 of the agency price per m² (18 cells), a private vendor 1.07 (29 cells). The cells are few, so this is a direction, not a measurement. A share of adverts is not a market share: agencies duplicate adverts more often.

The dearest 5% of a segment can mean two things: the dearest per square metre, or the biggest total. For a house for sale the second starts at €1,229,500.

Per m² the dearest adverts leave at the market's pace: 31% against 30% on sale. They are mostly adverts where everything is dear: Ljubljana (151), Piran (71), Koper (21). By total, the biggest adverts hardly leave: 18% against 30% on sale and 25% against 42% on rent. A house over a million is the stickiest stock on the board.

What such a house sold for cannot be learned from adverts.

Do buyers buy flats to let them? The real-estate transaction register shows it directly: the same unit is first sold, then let.

A dwelling that did not change hands gets a registered lease within two years in 3.3% of cases. A bought existing flat in private hands in 7.5%, 2.3 times as often. A bought new-build flat in private hands in 7.4%: new build adds nothing.

The new-build premium the average shows is public housing: flats bought by public funds are let in 52% of cases (new builds in 65%). That is public rental provision, the opposite of private buy-to-let. A letting that is not registered is not visible.

In four Alpine towns short-term letting is not a district, it is the town: in Bohinj 92% of dwellings are in cells with at least 20 accommodation units per 100 dwellings, in Bled 85%, in Piran 55%, in Ljubljana 7%.

On the coast the rent in the centre does not respond, because it is already at its ceiling. The ring further out does: between 1 and 2.5 km from the centre, registered rents in the cells with the most short-term letting are +49% higher than in those with the least.

Instead the core loses residents: on the coast registered residents per dwelling fall from 2.12 to 1.23, while Ljubljana stays at 1.80. In Piran that is about 1,487 dwellings without residents, in Ljubljana 1,111. The grid cannot tell a short-term let from a holiday home: both are a dwelling with no registered resident.

Since 2,024, 12,712 dwellings have been completed, and 863 new flats and houses are on the board for sale. That is 6.8 adverts per 100 new dwellings, from 10.4 (Celje) and 8.1 in Ljubljana to 0.5 (Slovenj Gradec).

Building permits barely predict the adverts (Spearman 0.25): 106 municipalities with no new-build advert hold 26% of residential permits. A house its owner builds is never advertised.

And 27% of new-build adverts sell a home that does not exist yet, with a build year after 2026; 41% of those are in Ljubljana.