By Tessar Napitupulu, Founder & CEO, PT Arfadia Digital Indonesia · July 2026 · 9 min read
Bank Indonesia data shows primary-market residential sales contracted 1.29% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2025, even as the country's long-term structural housing demand remains solidly intact. At the same time, secondary-market listings and buyer search interest grew steadily through the second half of 2025. That is not a contradiction, it is a specific, actionable signal about where content investment should shift, and most developer and agent content calendars, built around assumptions that were reasonable eighteen months ago, have not caught up to it yet.
Is the Indonesian property market actually growing or shrinking right now?
Both things are true, at different time horizons, and conflating them produces bad content strategy either way. Market-research estimates project long-term growth in the range of 5% to 8% compound annual growth through the early 2030s, driven by a housing backlog estimated at roughly 11.66 million households and continued urbanisation. That structural trend is real and durable. Separately, and on a much shorter time horizon, Bank Indonesia data shows the primary market specifically, new developer-led sales, cooling through 2025: a 1.29% year-on-year contraction in Q3 2025, following an even steeper 3.80% year-on-year decline in Q2. The honest summary is a market with solid long-term fundamentals experiencing a genuine short-term soft patch concentrated specifically in new developer sales, not a market in broad decline.
2025 market indicators, year-on-year
Source: Bank Indonesia data via Global Property Guide. Note the distinction between sales volume (falling) and the price index (still rising modestly) at the same time, in the same primary market.
The practical difference between developer and agent positioning is worth being explicit about. A developer's content is inherently tied to whatever project is currently active, so a temporary softening in primary demand is felt directly and immediately in that project's own lead flow, and the honest response is sharper differentiation and financing support for the current launch, not pretending the broader trend does not exist. An agent, working across many listings and not tied to a single launch calendar, can shift weighting toward secondary-market and take-over content far more fluidly, and is arguably better positioned to benefit from this specific shift than most developers are, provided the content calendar actually reflects that flexibility rather than mirroring a developer's launch-centric approach out of habit.
Where did the demand that left the primary market actually go?
Largely into the secondary, resale market, and the shift shows up clearly in mortgage behaviour, not just listing volume. Mortgage take-over-and-top-up transactions, where a buyer takes over an existing loan rather than originating a new one, rose to roughly 74% of mortgage transactions in the second half of 2025, up from 57% in the first half. Home-search activity for resale properties also rose sharply, with one measure showing a 32% month-on-month increase in September 2025 search activity tied specifically to resale interest. This is a buyer base that has not disappeared, it has redirected toward a different transaction type, and content strategy built entirely around new-launch messaging is speaking to a shrinking share of active search behaviour.
Is the secondary-market shift happening evenly everywhere, or concentrated in specific areas?
It shows some concentration worth knowing if your served areas overlap with it. Secondary-market listing growth through the second half of 2025 was not evenly distributed across Greater Jakarta; Bogor Regency, Depok, and South Tangerang each accounted for roughly 8% of new secondary listings individually during this period, a meaningfully larger share than most other satellite areas, suggesting resale activity concentrated in these specific corridors more than the regional picture as a whole would suggest. If your served neighbourhoods sit within or near these three areas, the secondary-market content opportunity described throughout this piece is likely more pressing than the national averages alone convey, and content strategy should reflect that local intensity rather than applying a uniform national assumption to every served area equally.
A separate, longer-term structural trend worth flagging, even though it sits somewhat apart from the primary-secondary shift, concerns industrial and logistics property specifically. Areas near Cikarang and Karawang are seeing sustained demand tied to electric-vehicle battery supply-chain investment, with logistics-property demand in these corridors projected to grow at roughly 6.49% compound annual growth, a distinct dynamic from the residential primary-secondary shift but relevant for any agency whose client base spans both residential and industrial or logistics real estate. Content strategy for a diversified agency should treat these as genuinely separate market narratives requiring separate content tracks, rather than folding logistics-sector context into residential-focused neighbourhood content where it does not naturally belong.
Does this mean developers should stop marketing new launches?
No, and that would be an overcorrection in the other direction. New-launch demand has not vanished, it has softened on a specific, cyclical basis, and developer content built around the launch calendar, pre-launch teasers, groundbreaking updates, handover milestones, remains the right approach for developer-specific content. What needs to change is the relative weighting of the overall content calendar: less exclusive reliance on new-launch urgency messaging as the only lever, and meaningfully more investment in the evergreen, neighbourhood-level, financing-focused content that serves the larger, currently more active secondary-market and take-over-and-top-up buyer segment. This is a rebalancing question, not a binary switch.
What does this actually change for an agent's content, specifically?
Agents, whose business is not tied to a single project's launch cycle in the way a developer's is, are structurally better positioned to capture this shift right now, provided their content reflects it. Neighbourhood-level, resale-focused content, comparison content between similar resale listings, and mortgage take-over-and-top-up explainer content are all directly aligned with where buyer search behaviour actually moved in 2025. An agent whose content calendar is still built primarily around promoting specific new-launch listings is underserving the larger, currently more active side of their own addressable market.
| Content type | 2025 relevance shift |
|---|---|
| New-launch urgency content | Still relevant for developers, but a smaller share of active buyer search |
| Neighbourhood & resale-comparison content | Rising relevance, aligned with the larger active buyer segment |
| Mortgage take-over/top-up explainers | Directly aligned with the fastest-growing mortgage-transaction type |
Does this shift change which keywords are actually worth targeting?
Yes, in a fairly direct way. Search terms carrying new-launch language, "rumah baru," "unit perdana," "harga launching," still matter for developer content but represent a proportionally smaller and more competitive slice of active search volume than they did when primary-market activity was stronger. Terms tied to resale and take-over transactions, "rumah second," "over kredit," "take over KPR," and neighbourhood-comparison phrasing between established areas, have grown in relative importance and, in many cases, remain less competitively contested simply because fewer sites have deliberately built content around them yet. A keyword strategy still weighted heavily toward new-launch terms in 2026, without at least a meaningful secondary-market and take-over content track alongside it, is optimising for a shrinking share of the pie.
This does not mean abandoning new-launch keyword work, particularly for developers actively marketing a current project. It means treating the keyword strategy as a portfolio that should be periodically rebalanced against current transaction data, the same way a financial portfolio gets rebalanced against changing market conditions, rather than a fixed plan set once at the start of a campaign and left unchanged for years.
How should reporting and KPIs change to reflect this shift?
Segment reporting by content type and buyer-journey stage rather than reviewing organic performance as one undifferentiated total. A report showing overall organic traffic holding steady can hide a meaningful decline in new-launch-content performance being offset by growth in neighbourhood and take-over-content performance, and a team that only sees the aggregate number will not know to shift investment even though the underlying data is telling a clear story. Breaking out performance by primary-market content, secondary-market content, and financing-education content separately, even at a basic level, surfaces exactly the kind of signal this article is describing well before a full quarter or year of aggregate reporting would reveal it on its own.
For agencies managing this on behalf of a developer client, this is also a useful moment to have an honest conversation about content-calendar weighting going into 2026, grounded in the actual Bank Indonesia data rather than a general sense that "the market feels slower." Clients are generally more receptive to a rebalancing recommendation backed by specific, sourced, dated figures than to a vague suggestion that strategy needs to change.
Is this shift specific to Indonesia, or part of a broader regional pattern?
The specific figures cited here are Indonesia-specific, drawn from Bank Indonesia data, and should not be assumed to generalise automatically to other Southeast Asian markets, each of which has its own rate environment, housing-supply dynamics, and buyer behaviour. What is worth taking as a more general lesson, applicable regardless of market, is the underlying discipline: content strategy should be built on current transaction and search-behaviour data specifically, refreshed at least quarterly, rather than on an assumption about market direction formed a year or two ago and never revisited.
None of this requires a wholesale rewrite of an existing content calendar overnight. It requires an honest quarterly audit of what is actually being published against what current transaction and search data says buyers are actually doing, and a willingness to shift weighting incrementally as that picture changes, rather than defending a plan built on last year's assumptions simply because it was expensive to build in the first place.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the primary-market slowdown expected to be temporary, or a longer structural change?
Available research treats it as a cyclical softening within a longer-term structurally growing market, rather than a permanent shift, though the specific duration of the current cycle is not something this research can forecast with confidence. Content strategy should be revisited quarterly against current data rather than locked in based on a single snapshot.
Should a developer with a strong project actively market against the "resale is more popular now" narrative?
Rather than argue against a data-supported trend, a stronger position is showing why this specific project justifies new-purchase consideration despite the broader shift, through genuine differentiation, financing support, or location advantages, rather than making a general case that new launches are automatically the better choice right now.
Does the rise in mortgage take-over-and-top-up transactions create a specific content opportunity?
Yes, and it is currently underserved. A clear explainer on how take-over-and-top-up financing works, its eligibility requirements, and its trade-offs against originating a fresh mortgage addresses a transaction type that grew to nearly three-quarters of the mortgage market in H2 2025, with comparatively little dedicated content currently addressing it directly.
How often should this kind of market-data-driven content strategy actually be revisited?
Quarterly is a reasonable minimum, aligned with when Bank Indonesia and other primary sources typically publish updated figures. A content calendar built on data from eighteen months ago in a market moving this quickly is working from an outdated picture of buyer behaviour.
What is the single biggest mistake agencies make when reacting to a market shift like this one?
Overreacting to a single quarter's figures by abandoning an entire content category, rather than rebalancing the weighting between categories. A one-quarter contraction in primary sales does not mean new-launch content should stop entirely, and a growing secondary-market trend does not mean it should become the only focus. The discipline is proportional rebalancing based on a genuine read of the data, revisited each quarter, not a dramatic pivot based on one data point.