What homes on the Slovenian coast and Karst really sell for

The Evidenca trga nepremičnin (ETN, the real estate market register) is kept by GURS, Slovenia's Surveying and Mapping Authority. Each record carries the price written in the contract, the date it was signed, the address down to the street number, the building and the unit, the year of construction, the cadastral floor areas and any land sold with it.

The data reach GURS from two directions: from FURS, the tax administration, for every deal subject to the real estate transfer tax, and from VAT-registered sellers such as developers. GURS estimates that the register captures almost every sale in the country. The extracts can be downloaded free of charge and without registration, municipality by municipality and year by year.

What the register does not record is whether an agency was involved: that field has not been collected since July 2019.

Our figures come from the extract dated 2 October 2026, downloaded on 5 October 2026, covering contracts signed up to 31 August 2026, and are published as aggregates, without addresses. For an owner on the coast or the Karst the point cuts both ways: what comparable houses really sold for is public, and it can be shown to a buyer.

1. The price covers everything the contract sells. House, garage, parking space, garden and any other plot sit in one figure. For apartments we keep sales that include a garage, a parking space or a cellar; GURS subtracts the value of garages and parking spaces in its own statistics, we do not, and on the coast the difference is small.

2. No transfer tax, but VAT where it applies. The register price excludes the real estate transfer tax (DPN, 2%), which the law places on the seller. When a listing says that the buyer takes over the tax (kupec prevzame DPN), the buyer pays it on top of the contract price. New homes sold by companies carry VAT instead of the transfer tax, and the register price includes it: every new-build apartment in our sample is VAT-inclusive, while among resales virtually none is.

3. The floor area is net, not commercial. The register measures the uporabna površina, the useful floor area of the rooms. For apartments GURS defines it without balconies, terraces, cellars and garages. Italian listings and the OMI tables use the commercial area, which includes the walls and counts part of the balconies and outbuildings. The same apartment therefore has more square metres in an Italian listing than in the Slovenian cadastre, and a Slovenian price per square metre looks higher than it is. It is also why the median apartment sold in Koper, at 53 m², is not a studio.

Two smaller points. We count sales, not homes: a house sold twice counts twice. And most sales from 2025 and 2026 are still in GURS's verification class; when the checks close, some figures may move.

The figures are medians of market sales: deals in the classes GURS marks as market transactions, including those still under verification, made on the open market or at a voluntary auction. Forced and bankruptcy auctions, leasing contracts and sales between relatives or related parties are out, and so is everything below a price floor that catches garages, plots of land, part-shares and token prices.

• Houses: one house in one building, sold whole, finished, with a registered useful floor area. Garages, parking spaces, farm buildings, technical rooms and land may be part of the sale; apartments and commercial premises may not.
• Apartments: exactly one apartment, sold whole and finished, with a garage, parking space or cellar allowed.
• Period: contracts signed from January 2023 to August 2026; for the top end, from January 2021.
• Threshold: a median appears only where there are at least fifteen sales. Below that, a median is the price of one or two houses dressed up as a statistic.

As a test, we set our 2025 figures against the official GURS annual report. For resale apartments ours track the official medians closely, on the coast and on the Karst, and so do Karst houses. For coastal houses ours come out lower: the four coastal municipalities include the rural Istrian hinterland, which GURS treats as a separate, cheaper area, and our filters are slightly wider.

Median price per square metre of useful floor area, median price and median size, contracts from January 2023 to August 2026.

The coast

• Koper: €4,370/m² on 688 sales; median price €230,000, with the middle half between €180,000 and €286,000; median size 53 m². The largest market on the coast and the most ordinary one. Part of it is new build, at VAT-inclusive prices.
• Izola: €4,590/m² on 351 sales; median price €230,000, median size 52 m². GURS reports that Izola's values are closing in on those of Piran and Portorož, driven by buyers from inland Slovenia and from abroad. In 2026 a large new-build scheme accounts for a good share of its apartment sales.
• Piran: €4,560/m² on 310 sales; median price €205,000, but a median size of only 46 m². Flats here are smaller than anywhere else on the coast except Ankaran.
• Ankaran: €5,030/m² on 69 sales, the highest figure on the coast, on very small units (37 m² median). The last large apartment block dates from 2009, because the municipality opposes big new developments. The port of Koper is next door; GURS finds that it does not hold values back.

The Karst

• Sežana: €2,860/m² on 134 sales; median price €155,000.
• Divača: €2,780/m² on 44 sales; median price €150,000.
• Hrpelje-Kozina: €3,340/m² on 62 sales; median price €170,000.

In its 2025 report GURS ranks the coast second in Slovenia for apartment prices per square metre, behind Ljubljana alone. The Karst is a different market, priced well below the coast.

A house price contains the plot, the outbuildings and the state of the building. GURS itself does not publish a price per square metre for houses: with houses and plots this varied, it warns, such figures may not be comparable and can mislead. We follow the same rule and show, for houses, the median price, the middle half of the prices and the median useful floor area.

The coast

• Koper: median €250,000 on 260 sales; middle half €180,000 to €331,000; 80 m² of useful floor area. The municipality runs from the town to the hills and on to the rural Istrian hinterland, which GURS treats as a separate, cheaper market.
• Izola: median €350,000 on 47 sales; middle half €215,000 to €495,000.
• Piran: median €428,000 on 90 sales; middle half €242,000 to €702,000. The dearest houses on the coast.
• Ankaran: too few house sales in the period to publish a median.

Inside the municipality of Koper, GURS draws a clear line. The local area it calls Hrvatini, Škofije, Prade faces south, sees the sea, gets sun in winter and sits close to the motorway. Vanganel and Marezige, further inland, have no sea view; GURS notes that they draw less interest from buyers from outside and have lower values, and in its 2025 figures the houses sold there are larger and newer than in Hrvatini, Škofije and Prade for a similar median price.

The Karst

• Sežana: median €181,000 on 68 sales; middle half €98,000 to €278,000.
• Divača: median €175,000 on 23 sales.
• Hrpelje-Kozina: median €177,000 on 34 sales.

On the Karst the house that changes hands is usually an old village house, often in stone and in need of work. In GURS's 2025 figures the median house sold on the Karst was built before the Second World War, and its plot is much larger than on the coast.

A municipal median hides large differences: within the municipality of Piran, Portorož and Lucija are two different markets. Below, the settlements with at least fifteen sales in the period.

Houses

• Portorož: median €788,000 on 16 sales, for a median 151 m² of useful floor area, with the lower quartile at €668,000.
• Piran town: €500,000 on 15 sales.
• Lucija: €405,000 on 17 sales.
• Izola town: €284,000 on 22 sales.
• Koper town: €275,000 on 79 sales, on small houses (64 m² median).
• Sežana town: €200,000 on 17 sales.

Apartments, per square metre of useful floor area

• Koper town: €4,590/m² on 561 sales. Šmarje, in the hinterland: €4,020/m², on larger flats (72 m² median).
• Izola town: €4,590/m². Ankaran: €5,030/m².
• Lucija: €4,640/m². Portorož: €4,760/m². Piran town: €4,760/m², on very small flats (39 m² median).
• On the Karst: Kozina €3,360/m², Hrpelje €3,020/m², Divača €2,900/m², Sežana €2,970/m². Kozina is dearer than Sežana, and its flats are newer: for the Kozina and Divača area GURS gives a median year of construction of 2008, against 1976 for Sežana.

How rare is an expensive house? We counted the sales of single houses, with the filters described above, from January 2021 to August 2026, at three thresholds: half a million euros, three-quarters of a million and a million.

• Piran: of 159 house sales, 53 at half a million or more, 27 at three-quarters of a million or more, 18 at a million or more.
• Koper: of 444, respectively 38, 10 and 5.
• Izola: of 80, respectively 14, 5 and 4.
• Ankaran: of 18, respectively 3, 3 and 0.
• Sežana: of 120, respectively 3, 0 and 0.
• Divača and Hrpelje-Kozina: of 55 and 61 house sales, 0 and 0 at half a million or more.

The top of the coast is concentrated in the municipality of Piran, and within it in the cadastral municipality (katastrska občina) of Portorož, which takes in Portorož, Lucija, Seča and Strunjan. On the Karst, a market above half a million barely exists.

Three caveats. This sample leaves out contracts that bundle a house with a second house, an apartment, commercial premises or other parts, or that sell only a share; counting them adds a few sales at the top, on the coast and on the Karst, where the only sale at a million or more, still under verification, is a house sold together with an apartment, restaurant premises and farm buildings. A handful of top-end houses changed hands twice within the period, one more reason to read these figures as sales, not houses. And the highest prices recorded on the coast are not ordinary villas: they are VAT deals with no registered useful floor area, so we do not quote them as records. GURS writes that the dearest houses, close to the sea or with a view, come onto the market only as an exception.

A median is the middle sale: half sold for more, half for less. The middle half, between the first and third quartile, shows how wide the market is. Neither is the price of a given house.

• The mix moves the median. If a year sees more old flats sold, or a large new-build scheme at VAT-inclusive prices, the median moves even if no single home has changed in value. To say how much prices have risen, use the GURS price index, which corrects for part of this effect, not the gap between two medians. On that index, from 2020 to 2025 coastal apartments rose more than coastal houses, and the coast rose less than the Slovenian average, starting from prices that were already high.
• Small samples swing. Even at fifteen sales, one or two unusual deals can shift a median.
• A house is not its floor area. Plot, outbuildings, condition, view, a pool, the noise of the port, summer traffic, the bora, a steep drive and the parking all go into the price, and none of them is in the register. Some sales recorded as houses are, in practice, land with a small house on it.
• Listings are not sales. An asking price on a portal is what a seller hopes for; the register records what a buyer paid.

To price one specific house the order runs the other way: first the sales in the same building or street, then the closest comparable houses nearby, then the official statistics, and only at the end the listings. When we analysed houses on the Koper hills and on the Karst, the medians were the backdrop, never the answer.

Buyers who know Trieste reach for the OMI tables of the Italian revenue agency. The comparison needs care: the OMI publishes estimated value ranges by zone, not contract prices, and it measures commercial area, walls included, while the ETN measures net useful area. For the same flat the commercial area is larger, so the price per square metre is lower.

In our reading, the gap for apartments is too wide to be explained by the measuring rule alone. That is reasoning, not a measurement: we have no sourced factor to convert one area into the other, so we do not set the two numbers side by side. What can be said honestly:

• the Slovenian coast is not a cheaper Trieste: for apartments it is a seaside-resort market, dearer than Trieste;
• the Slovenian Karst sits closer to Trieste's levels;
• the Slovenian market is small: the whole coast records in a year a fraction of the sales of the city of Trieste alone. The two countries count sales differently, but the order of magnitude says that supply is thin and good houses change hands rarely.