The world’s most bubbly housing markets

Swiss bank UBS has compiled an index of the most bubbly housing markets in the world. No prizes for guessing who comes top.

ubs-house-price-bubble

House prices are bubbling over in several of the world's top cities, says UBS, which has created a Global Real Estate Bubble Indexto measure the potential for housing bubbles. Here are the five most at risk, with their index score. A score over 1.5 is a "bubble risk", while a score between 0.5 and 1.5 is "overvalued".

1. London 1.88

15-11-19-sale-634

London's property market is looking distinctly bubbly

UBS reckons London is the most overvalued market, based bothon price-to-income and price-to-rent ratios. Average real (afterinflation)dwelling prices are up by almost 40% since the startof 2013, more than offsetting all financial-crisis-related losses.House prices no longer bare any resemblance to local householdearnings due to purchases for investment purposes by both localand global buyers.

2. Hong Kong 1.67

679-HK

3. Sydney 1.39

769-Sydney

4. Vancouver 1.35

769-Vancouver

5. San Francisco 1.15

769-SF

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Marina has a PhD in globalisation and the media from the London School of Economics, where she worked as a teaching assistant on the MSc Global Media. In 2014 she was invited to be a visiting scholar at Columbia University's sociology department in New York.

She has written for the Economists’ Intelligent Life magazine, the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and Standpoint magazine in the UK; the New York Observer in the US; and die Bild and Frankfurter Rundschau in Germany. She is trilingual and lives in London. She writes features and is the markets editor at MoneyWeek..