Tuesday, January 03, 2012

Knight Frank global housing predictions for 2012


Regular readers will know that I'm a fan of the research team at Knight Frank and particularly like the way they present their research.

Of course we have to understand that they have an extraordinarily wealthy client base and look at things from a different viewpoint to the majority of other property analysts.

Their 2012 property predictions report says that instability in the Eurozone has led to very weak mainstream housing markets but, perversely, this has helped "prime" markets such as London & Paris.

They forecast that 44% of the worldwide cities they monitor are set to see house price increases.

Several Asian cities are set to see soaring house prices, including price rises of up to 20% in Bangkok and Jakarta, with Paris (yet again), Kiev and St Petersburg forecast to see similar increases.

However, certain cities are pipped to see massive falls, with values declining by up to 20% in Shanghai, Mumbai, Hong Kong and Geneva.

As regular readers will also know I don't have much (any) faith in house price indices - transaction numbers are the only key indicator that really count.

A double digit rise in Paris would mean plenty of misleading headlines about "soaring French house prices" but would be distinctly unhelpful when it comes to matching vendor expectations with reality here in SW France.

It all makes interesting reading if you have the coffee ready and a spare fifteen minutes though.

www.cognacproperty.com

1 comment:

Omni Chaparala said...

You are right. Transaction numbers provide an insight that other metrics dont provide.