Inside Money: House prices weaken as global property trends converge - survey

According to a recent survey of global house prices, the New Zealand property market has experienced only moderate inflation compared to other countries. Photo / Ross Setford

New Zealand has zero affordable housing markets, according to the '11th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey'.

Affordability must be in the eye of the beholder, however, because in spite of Demographia's charts and tables, Kiwis keep on buying houses.

And while whining about (or celebrating) high house prices is a long-standing New Zealand tradition, the last year has seen the whole debate step up a gear.

But according to the most recent survey of global house prices published by real estate firm Knight Frank, the New Zealand property market experienced only moderate inflation compared to other countries over the 12 months to December 2014.

The Knight Frank survey puts New Zealand at 20th out of 55 countries as measured by price increases over the annual period. Compared to the 16 per cent plus price increases experienced in Ireland and Turkey over 2014, New Zealand's 6 per cent rise looks almost sensible.

(Astute table-readers, however, will note that over the December 2014 quarter the New Zealand house price increase of 3.7 per cent was a top-five performance.)

About a quarter of all countries in the Knight Frank Global House Price Index saw prices fall during 2014, with the worst property market of the year, Ukraine's, falling 16.7 per cent over the period.

Ukraine's place at the bottom of the pile might not be surprising but there are some big names in the negative property price corner including: Singapore, Italy, France and China.
Overall, the Knight Frank survey notes the global property market could be coming off the boil.

"The Global House Price index, which is weighted according to each country's GDP... slipped by 0.6 per cent in the final quarter of the year," the report says. "This represents the index's weakest performance since the third quarter of 2012."

Over the 2014 year the Knight Frank index rose by 1.8 per cent compared to 6.3 per cent increase during the previous annual period.

"[And] the gap between the top and bottom ranked countries shrank from 61 percentage points at the end of 2013 to 33 at the end of 2014, suggesting that there is a degree of convergence taking place amongst global housing markets," Knight Frank says.