For the first time, private developers are building houses in Beit She’an.
By JOHN BENZAQUENBeit She’an Archeological Park.(photo credit: BEIT SHE’AN REGIONAL COUNCIL)
Beit She’an is one of the country’s most historic cities. In this case, the city’s status as a historical tourist attraction has significant bearing on its economy and, ipso facto, its real estate.Unlike other historic cities in this part of the world, Beit She’an – which has been inhabited for 7,000 years – has much more to do with Greek and Roman imperial history than with the Bible or Jewish history.The city is primarily known for being the capital of the Decapolis – a confederation of 10 cities east and west of the Jordan River. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, it was called Scythopolis.Beit She’an has been dubbed the “Pompeii of Galilee,” because on the morning of January 18, 749 CE, an earthquake destroyed the city. Its ruins, like those of Pompeii, have remained undisturbed – and also like Pompeii, they have become a large archeological park, which contains the ruins of Scythopolis as well as of earlier periods. As evidence of the city’s destruction by earthquake, there are dozens of massive columns that toppled over in the same direction.Besides its Greek past, Beit She’an has a long and well-documented earlier history. During the late Bronze Age, circa 2000 BCE, it was the center of Egyptian rule in the northern part of Canaan.Archeologists found monumental stelae with inscriptions from the reigns of Seti I and Ramses II, which are now in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem.Other finds from the site that have made it to the museum are a life-size statue of Ramses III, and many other Egyptian inscriptions. Together, these constitute the most significant assemblage of Egyptian objects in Canaan.The modern town of Beit She’an was built on the remains of the small Arab town of Beisan. In the 1948 War of Independence, its original inhabitants fled – the small Christian community to Nazareth, and the Muslim community across the Jordan. The government expropriated their buildings and, in part, used them to house new immigrants, primarily from North Africa.Today, the town has nearly 20,000 inhabitants. Located 27 km. south of Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee), it sits at the junction of the Harod and Jordan valleys. The fertility of the land and the abundance of water led the Jewish sages to say, “If the Garden of Eden is in the land of Israel, then its gate is Beit She’an.” It is no surprise that the site has been almost continuously settled since the Chalcolithic period.And where there are people, there is real estate.Last year, over 300,000 tourists visited Beit She’an, but these were primarily day-trippers who were there to see the ruins of Scythopolis. To paraphrase Julius Caesar, these tourists could say, “Veni, vidi, reliqui” – I came, I saw, I left. None of the previous municipal administrations bothered to develop the town as a tourist center, and there are no hotels or restaurants.However, the current administration under Mayor Rafael Ben-Shitrit wants to convert the town into a tourist hub where visitors can spend the night, and if he succeeds, entrepreneurs will develop tourist-oriented businesses such as boutique hotels, restaurants, pubs and souvenir shops. These would create jobs, and would provide a strong impetus for the real estate market.At present, the real-estate scene is challenging.Since 1970, no new apartment buildings have been constructed, and that reality has dominated the real- estate scene: Inhabitants live either in buildings that the government constructed in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, or in single-family or semidetached homes that residents built on land they bought in Israel Lands Authority tenders.But this is changing.For the first time since modern Beit She’an sprouted out of an immigrant shanty town (ma’abara) 60 years ago, the private sector is building apartments.Ifrach Gilad is the general manager and proprietor of Gilad May Enterprises, which is building Gilad Heights – a complex of 103 dwellings in the northwestern part of town, near the new railway station.“From a real-estate perspective, Beit She’an has great potential. We predict that demand for our dwellings in Gilad Heights will be strong,” says Gilad.He explains that so far, “in Beit She’an, there is no real-estate middle ground. People live either in the tenements built by the government up to the early ’70s, or in semidetached or single-family dwellings they built for themselves on government land marketed by land tenders. Since there are no land tenders anymore for private individuals, those families who want to upgrade their style of dwelling are stuck. Gilad Heights will give them the opportunity to buy a large modern apartment.”According to Joseph Ezra, a partner at the Shahaf Real Estate brokerage, demand is brisk because “supply is limited. Furthermore, the completion of the Haifa-Beit She’an railway has increased interest in the city, and this is reflected in demand for real estate.There is demand from investors, who are betting on a rise in prices with the completion of the Haifa-Beit She’an railway line in 2016.”Meanwhile, he says, “investors are also buying property for rent. Not all residents of Beit She’an can afford to buy a dwelling, and many are renting. Annual yields on residential property in town are high, from 5.5 percent to 6.5%, and consequently there is no shortage of investors.”As a result of the rise in demand, prices have climbed strongly in the past five years. A three-room apartment in one of the government-built apartment buildings, which cost less than NIS 250,000 in 2010, cannot be bought for less than NIS 400,000 today.Single-family homes or semidetached dwellings can cost up to NIS 1.5 million.