Friday, June 27, 2008

Real estate bust in Estonia

For a while, I have been looking for numbers on Estonian real estate market, to see the similarities and the differences from Latvia. But the numbers have been hard to find. In Latvia, virtually every major real estate agency releases monthly estimates of the average apartment price in Riga.

For Estonia, either I'm bad at finding such estimates or they are not made public. But, yesterday, I came across an Estonian article in which an investor calculated the averages himself. The result: advertised prices have declined 23% in last 14 months. This is quite similar to Latvian numbers that I reported on this blog.

The big question is how many Eastern European countries will get affected. I talked with a Slovak colleague last week. And what I heard about the market in Bratislava sounded remarkably like Riga before the bubble burst. But, again, it has been difficult to find statistics that are directly comparable to Latvian ones...

3 comments:

@mirx said...

You can find Estonian real estate transaction statistics from Land Board website:
http://www.maaamet.ee/index.php?lang_id=2&page_id=453&menu_id=78

it's in Estonian tough, however some guide in English is published...

Anonymous said...

You should count Romania here, too. The situation there is slightly different because 2008 is a year full of elections (local elections, national elections, and presidential elections coming the next year) and politicians are trying to hide any possible "damages", but reports in the market already speak of -20% in prices since the peak of January 2008. And this year was the worst for the realtors, a suddenly worst year after a paradisiac 2007: people just don't want anymore to buy, they just stopped buying, in December 2007 everyone was crazy to buy, then in January... all gone! Stock exchange had fallen since January with 30%, inflation rose to 9.5% (and still counting...), which forced Central Bank to succesively rise the interest rate from 7% in September to 10% today. Anyway, the economic growth in the first quarter was still strong (8%) but many people said that this is a sign of overheating and in fact new data showed that in May the retail had fallen 6.4%. I really am very curious to hear economic growth data for the second quarter. Real real estate data will emerge only after the national elections.

James said...

Latvia is in the Russia?


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