Expo Real 2018

••• 11 ••• Branchennews Euro area: house prices up by 4.5 per cent Eurostat’s House Price Index (HPI): highest increases in Latvia, Slovenia, Ireland and Portugal H ouse prices, as measured by the House Price Index, rose by 4.5 per cent in the euro area and by 4.7 per cent in the EU in the first quarter of 2018 com- pared with the same quarter of the previous year. These figures come from Euro- stat, the statistical office of the European Union. Compared with the fourth quarter of 2017, house prices rose by 0.6 per cent in the euro area and by 0.7 per cent in the EU in the first quarter of 2018. Among the Member States for which data are available, the high- est annual increases in house prices in the first quarter of 2018 were recorded in Latvia (+13.7 per cent), Slovenia (+13.4 per cent), Ireland (+12.3 per cent) and Portu- gal (+12.2 per cent), while prices fell in Sweden and Italy (both -0.4 per cent) as well as in Finland (-0.1 per cent). Compared with the pre- vious quarter, the highest increas- es were recorded in Latvia (+7.5 per cent), Hungary and Slovenia (both +4.4 per cent) as well as in Portugal (+3.7 per cent), while the largest decreases were observed in Malta (-4.7 per cent), Cyprus (-1.8 per cent) and Sweden (-0.8 per cent). Background The House Price Index (HPI) meas- ures the price changes of all resi- dential properties purchased by households (flats, detached houses, terraced houses, etc.), both newly built and existing, in- dependently of their final use and independently of their previous owners. The Member States’ HPIs are compiled by the National Sta- tistical Institutes. The euro area and the EU aggregate HPIs are compiled by Eurostat. HPIs are computed as annually chained in- dices with weights being updated each year. The European HPI ag- gregates are currently calculated as weighted averages of the na- tional HPIs using as weights the GDP at market prices (expressed in millions Purchasing Power Standards – PPS) of the countries concerned. Beautiful baltic metropolis Riga: according to Eurostat, the highest annual increases in house prices were recorded in Latvia (plus 13.7 per cent). Photo: Gilly on Unsplash APPROVED BY unser Gütesiegel für Bewertungsgesellschaften