The data on deal cancellations published in the real estate review of the Chief Economist's Department at the Ministry of Finance in June has received a more in-depth analysis from senior deputy to the chief economist Galit Ben Naim. She referred to the data in a post she published on social media, focusing on two main aspects: the reasons why buyers cancel transactions, and the amounts they are required to pay following the cancellation, or in many cases, the amounts they manage to avoid.
The review revealed that according monitoring conducted by the Chief Economist in January 2026, 1,294 deals were cancelled between 2023 and 2025, while 37,000 deals were cancelled in the first half of 2026 and so far this August, the number of cancellations has jumped by 41% from last year and reached 1,821, mainly due to financing deals in which the buyer purchases the home before construction and only pays on completion of the apartment.
Ben Naim commented that in the cancelled agreements, two sentences that appeared in the documents caught her eye: "Since the buyer did not pay anything for the apartment" and "Since the buyer informed the seller that they were unable to complete the purchase."
An example of this is data from the southern region, which led in the number of cancellations of deals signed in 2023-2025, with 475 cancellations. Ben Naim notes that in about two-thirds of cases, the reason for the cancellation, as reported to the Tax Authority, was financial difficulties. The reasons varied from case to case, ranging from "the buyer was not approved for a mortgage" to "the buyer came to the conclusion that they were unable to finance the purchase." She also noted that in some cases, the buyers even received a contractor loan, in which the contractor bears the interest but even this financing solution was not enough to complete the deal.
Another statistic that Ben Naim mentions concerns the amounts actually paid up to the date of cancellation. This shows that in a third of the transactions that were canceled in the south, the buyers had paid nothing. She also noted that if you add to this the transactions in which only tens of thousands of shekels were paid, the rate reaches half of the cancellations.
She then refers to the fact that the cancellations are not limited to the periphery. One of the examples that Ben Naim gave is a deal for a luxury home in Tel Aviv that was signed at the end of 2024 and was recently canceled. The reason for the cancellation was "financial difficulties." And in this case, too, the buyer did not pay anything up to the date of the transaction's cancellation.
Ben Naim also refers to the penalty that buyers pay for canceling deals. Contracts usually include compensation of 10% of the home’s price for cancelling, which can reach hundreds of thousands of shekels. However, in quite a few of the cancellation agreements, the wording "Ex Gratia" appears, with sellers waiving compensation or settling for partial compensation.
In the south, the average compensation in canceled deals was about NIS 20,000. However, Ben Naim stresses that this is an average that is affected by many cases in which full exemption from compensation was granted, and therefore it does not necessarily reflect the cost to the person who violates the deal. In other cases, buyers were required to pay NIS 200,000 or more, and in Tel Aviv, the compensation in some cases reached about NIS 500,000.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on August 16, 2026.
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