This European city has the world’s fastest rising home prices

Prices in Budapest grew by 24% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2019

Budapest (Credit: Pixabay)
Budapest (Credit: Pixabay)

In the elegant Hungarian capital of Budapest, it’s good news for home sellers and not so good news for buyers.

No other city in the world saw prices climb higher than in Budapest in the third quarter of 2019. The price of a home rose 24 percent year-over-year, according to a Knight Frank study cited by Mansion Global.

It wasn’t a fluke for the city of 1.7 million — it topped Knight Frank’s list of highest-risers in the fourth quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019. The report pinned Budapest’s upward trajectory on falling unemployment and growing wages.

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That’s four times the rate of the U.S. city with the fastest rising prices, Phoenix, which experienced 6 percent year-over-year growth.

The city of Xi’an in central China overtook it in the second quarter, but fell back to number 2 with 15.9 percent growth in the third quarter. Another Chinese city, Wuhan, ranked third in the world with 14.9 percent growth. Russia’s Saint Petersburg and Moscow were both in the top 10.

Prices rose in 78 percent of the 150 cities included in the report, but the 3.2 percent global average is the slowest since the second quarter of 2015 and a number of top U.S. markets saw growth below that.
New York and Chicago saw prices move up by less than a percentage point. Prices rose 1.7 percent in Los Angeles and 3.1 percent in Miami. Prices fell 0.7 percent in San Francisco.
Prices also fell in some top-tier cities around the globe, including London and Hong Kong. Jerusalem saw the most significant drop, with prices falling 13.6 percent year-over-year. [Mansion Global]