Manila has the highest annual price appreciation of any housing market in the world, at 22%.

Harriet Arnold
3 min readMar 9, 2023

The new Global Residential Cities Index found that the average annual price increase for all 150 cities was 4.3 percent. qatar properties

Manila tops the annual world rankings for the second consecutive quarter, according to international property consultancy Knight Frank’s new Global Residential Cities Index, with price growth of 22% in the year to March 2020. Budapest continues to be the fastest-growing city in Europe, with a 16 percent increase. The trio of Central and Eastern European cities in the top ten includes Zagreb and Warsaw.

Apart from Manila, the top performers in Asia Pacific are Seoul and Melbourne, both with annual growth rates of 13%. In the 12 months to March, the index increased by 4.3 percent, the fastest annual rate of growth since Q3 2017. Over the course of the year, 85 percent of the 150 cities studied saw their prices rise.

A look at the 15 cities in China and the United States with the highest GDP highlights the severity of China’s slowdown in the first quarter of 2020, with average price growth of just 0.4 percent, the lowest average quarterly rate of growth for the 15 cities since Q1 2008.

In Q3, global home price growth slowed to a six-year low.

Hungary, Luxembourg, and Croatia have the highest average home price increases.

Home prices are increasing at an annual rate of 3.7 percent on average across 56 countries and territories, according to global real estate consultancy Knight Frank. This is the index’s slowest growth rate in more than six years. This trend can be seen in both the standard and prime segments of Knight Frank’s other global city indices.

Hungary leads the index this quarter with 15.4 percent annual price rise, fuelled by a strong economy (4.9 percent GDP growth expected in 2019*), low mortgage rates, high wage growth, and a variety of government subsidy programs, according to the most recent available data.

Other previous frontrunners from the last two years, such as Slovenia (18th), Malta (22nd), and Iceland (26th), have cooled significantly, owing to weaker economic landscapes, affordability issues, or a drop in tourism.

Some countries and territories, on the other hand, are climbing the rankings. Greece was ranked 24th a year earlier, with a price increase of 2.4 percent. While prices are still 37% below their 2008 high, they are now increasing at a 7.7% annual pace, putting Greece in 12th place out of 56 countries and territories.

This fifth, European countries account for seven of the top ten rankings, with the majority of them being in Central and Eastern Europe. Prices are growing from a low base, economies are improving, and borrowing rates are near historic lows.

On a global scale, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) are at the top of the rankings, with an average annual growth rate of 5.7 percent — prices in Russia are up 8.1 percent over the past year, and Ukraine has risen from the bottom of the rankings to now have an annual growth rate of 3.3 percent.

Knight Frank publishes two mainstream price indices: the Global Residential Cities Index (150 cities) and the Global House Price Index (country level). Two main patterns emerge from a study of the two indices. First, how much national house prices lag city markets by around six months, and second, how much the output gap between the two has narrowed since 2018.

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