Global City Residential Watch
Our weekly look at the latest global residential market indicators
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Housing market data for March is slowly petering through. To date, residential sales data looks surprisingly robust, perhaps because, aside from Hong Kong, the pandemic outbreak spread most rapidly in April in these particular markets.
As we reported previously, it’s also worth noting where these markets sit in relation to their property market cycles, all four have seen activity dip in their markets in the last two years and in Canada and New Zealand we were beginning to see evidence of pent up demand in January and February.
In terms of pricing, six of the nine cities that have published data for March show an improving scenario with the annual rate of growth either increasing or the rate of decline moderating. Of the markets tracked, Geneva and Toronto registered the largest uptick in prices in March.
A deeper dive into China’s recently released price data reveals a mixed picture. According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the annual rate of growth for cities such as Xi’an and Wuhan slowed significantly between June 2019 and March 2020, but some of the largest declines were seen not in the first quarter of 2020 but in the second half of 2019. In contrast, some of China’s largest cities – Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, have seen annual price growth accelerate over this period.
Of the cities tracked, Xi’an registered the strongest price growth in the year to March 2020, with prices up 11% over this period, followed by Wuhan (9.6%) and Wuxi (9.0%).
Alongside residential market indicators, we continue to track global economic activity via a range of metrics to gauge the impact of Covid-19 and to compare the pace of recovery across global cities.