House price and rent developments in Europe after the financial crisis

The presentation will deliver a European picture of developments in residential real estate after the financial crisis. The Eurostat database contains data on House price indices (HPI) at national level for all EU member states. The data starts in 2005 for some countries, and later for the others. From 2010 onwards, the available data allows a comparison encompassing all EU Member states plus Norway and Island.The advantage of the Eurostat data is that it is official data, compiled based on transaction prices and following a harmonised methodology across countries. The objective of this presentation is to show how this database can provide reliable answers to the following questions:How deep was the dip in the EU countries? When did the various countries pass with HPI pre-crisis levels? Who were the best performers in the last decade?The Eurostat database also contains data on the evolution of prices for new and existing dwellings. This presentation will reveal how the Eurostat database can be used to shed light on the analysis of the different patterns of the HPI for new and existing dwellings during the crisis and the following recovery. We show that by taking into account the dynamics of construction activity and sales of new dwellings during and after the crisis, the Eurostat data can be effectively used in the analysis of the evolution of housing markets in the EU in the last decade. A special focus will be on the countries having received a warning from the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) at end 2016 having identified these residential real estate markets as a risk for financial stability.Furthermore, we show how this data can be combined with data on rent prices evolution available also in the Eurostat database from the section dedicated to the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices. One relevant question is: did rent developments between 2008 and 2018 show similar patterns to house prices or were the rents developments much softer? Knowing what the data represents helps for a correct interpretation of the official figures.In summary, these datasets being official statistics published by Eurostat support to analyse both longer-term developments like recoveries after the crisis or latest developments indicating towards overheated residential real estate markets.