Global house prices suffer first quarterly decline in two years
Global house prices have suffered their first quarterly decline in more than two years, figures out yesterday show, as tensions between Greece and the Eurozone and weaker growth prospects in China weighed on consumer sentiment.
Knight Frank’s Global House Price Index, which is weighted according to each country’s GDP, fell by 0.6 per cent in the final quarter of 2014, despite rising by 1.8 per cent for the year as a whole.
This marked the index’s weakest performance since the third quarter of 2012 and was against a backdrop of slowing economic growth, falling oil prices and geopolitical turmoil in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Knight Frank’s head of international research Kate Everett Allen said the outlook for 2015 would depend on the extent to which the ECB’s new quantitative easing programme will stimulate the Eurozone’s housing markets and secondly, the timing of the US Federal Reserve’s rate rise.