Photo: Equalhuman / Wikimedia Commons
For years, buying a new apartment in Israel meant bringing a large pile of your own cash to the table. This week, two of the country’s biggest homebuilders said: don’t worry about that part. The bill can wait.
With some 85,000 new apartments sitting unsold, Gindi Holdings and Aviv Melisron each rolled out unusually aggressive financing offers, Globes reported this week. Both deals lower what a buyer must pay up front – and both leave most of the bill for later.
Gindi’s offer, called “The Big Bang,” lets buyers push NIS 900,000 of the purchase price ten years past move-in. The buyer pays 20% at signing and the rest on receiving the key, except the deferred sum, which a balloon loan from Bank Leumi or Mizrahi Tefahot covers. Gindi carries the interest; the buyer pays no interest or inflation linkage on the deferred amount for the whole decade. The offer covers about 300 apartments in four projects, roughly half of them in Herzliya’s Galil Yam neighborhood. Buyers must still pass the bank’s underwriting check on their ability to repay.
Aviv Melisron’s offer works differently: buyers can take a bridging loan against a home they already own to cover the entire first payment. The company carries the financing costs and interest until move-in; after that, the loan must be repaid. The plan is open to families trading up before they have sold their current home, investors who prefer to pledge a property rather than cash in savings, and first-time buyers whose parents let them borrow against the family home.
The offers land about a year and a half after Israel’s central bank tried to rein in exactly this kind of deal. In March 2025 it imposed extra capital requirements on loans for projects where more than 40% of the price is deferred, and capped developer-subsidized balloon loans at 10% of a bank’s mortgage business. Finance Ministry figures cited in the report show financing perks fell to 20% of new-apartment sales by May 2026, then jumped back – reaching about 30% of sales in August, above their level before the restrictions.
Mortgage adviser Yonatan Berliner warned that pledging an existing home raises a family’s leverage and its risk. Buyers who need to refinance such a loan after move-in, he said, may find it classified as an all-purpose loan rather than a regular mortgage – with considerably worse terms. Economist Aviv Ropel said the Gindi offer is a genuine benefit – he estimates the interest subsidy is worth roughly NIS 350,000 in today’s money, assuming a 5% rate – but warned it can create the feeling the debt has disappeared. It has not: after ten years the full NIS 900,000 comes due in a single payment. A buyer who cannot produce it would need to refinance, which Ropel estimates could add NIS 5,900 to 7,100 to the monthly payment, on top of the existing mortgage.
The plain takeaway for any family weighing these offers: the smaller payment today does not erase the debt. Buyers still repay every delayed shekel, and families who put up an existing home are taking on more borrowing risk, not less.
The Bank of Israel did not respond to the report’s request for comment. Whether the central bank moves against the new offers – and whether rival builders copy them – will decide if this week’s deals are a one-off or the start of a new round.
JBizNews Desk | Tel Aviv
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