by TYLER DURDEN at zerohedge.com
In many countries around the world, it seems like house prices have been constantly climbing.
Houses fulfill a rare mix of necessity, utility, sentimentality, and for many, also act as a primary investment to build wealth. And it’s that last angle, combined with increasing demand in many countries, that is driving housing prices skyward.
Using data from the Bank of International Settlements, Visual Capitalist’s Ehsan Soltani and Pallavi Rao have ranked the change in real residential property prices for 57 countries from 2010 to 2022.
Real prices assess the value of a good after adjusting for inflation. This is expressed in constant values relative to a base year, in this case, 2010. Nominal prices do not adjust for inflation.
In the dataset of 57 countries, 80% have seen increases in housing prices in the last 12 years.
Advanced economies, or the most developed countries in the world, have seen the highest increases. But across all measured countries, the real price of housing has increased nearly 30% on average since 2010.
Other countries with a 85% or higher increases in housing prices include Estonia, New Zealand, Chile, Turkey, Canada, and Luxembourg. As emerging market economies, Turkey and Chile are the outliers in this group of mostly advanced economies.
Many other emerging market economies also saw housing prices increase. In India and Malaysia, housing prices are up by 59%. Likewise, the Philippines (50%) and Colombia (40%) also saw real prices increase faster than the global average.
However, not all countries logged big housing price increases. Some countries in Europe, including France, Belgium, and Croatia, and Asia, including China, and Singapore, all saw less than 20% growth in real prices.
Russia, Greece, and Italy saw the largest contractions in prices, all with housing price drops of more than 20%.
But these cases also allow us to see inflation in action. In Russia for example, despite real housing prices contracting by 33%, nominal prices (which don’t account for inflation) are up more than 50%. In South Africa, where real prices have fallen 5%, nominal prices are up 72%.
Is Your Country in a Housing Bubble?