The Economist has its regular table showing how property prices world wide have developed:
Graph from this week’s Economist
As you’d expect, given the US sub-prime crisis, the US prices have dropped by around 5% in the last 12 months. More surprisingly, the UK prices, despite the concern in the British press about their property prices, gained by about 7%.
Meanwhile in Germany, the DAX has continued to hover at near-record levels for months and hardly a squeak has been heard in the press about the development of property prices locally, although they fell by 4% in the last year. I suppose, since the majority of Germans still rent rather than buy property (Germany has the lowest rate of home ownership in the EU – around 40%), that is not considered newsworthy.
On a related note: there is an interesting paper comparing the German and the Dutch property markets, which are surprisingly different, here (PDF file, size 124 KB).
