The prices for average homes in Europe

1. Luxemburg: 275,000 Euros
2. United Kingdom: 269,000 Euros
3. Netherlands: 260,000 Euros
4. Western Germany: 224,000 Euros
5. Ireland: 221,000 Euros
6. Eastern Germany: 183,000 Euros
7. France 172,00 Euros.



Although the average price has not much meaning....in my opinion....e.g. the minimum prices would look completely different - or even the prices for newly built homes. E.g. in the UK you won't find anything below 50k....in Eastern Germany you can get them for 5k etc......so these statistics make it seem like the house prices were "almost" the same in Europe.

This http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9267826 article in the Economist shows how spectacular the bubble is in the UK, compared to some other selected countries.

In summary it says that since 1975 the index of house prices in the UK has risen by almost 16x. In contrast, Germany (West Germany only prior to 1990) and Japan have risen by only 2x.

Since the year 2000 the UK property bubble really took off.

One must realise though, that the concentration of asset price bubbles in property is primarily in the South East of England. This is the area you should watch for any early signs of panic.

you missed bulgaria out, or the survey did. haha. just bought a beaut there. never thought id be able to buy a house for cash. If i can sort a business iut its cheap labour too. lol

It is so funny, that people from the UK now buy houses in Bulgaria, just because they are "cheap".

You can get houses for free or almost for free, in a lot of regions and countries that are even closer to the UK then Bulgaria.

In Bulgaria, house prices are over-valued now, too. They only appear cheap to you as you are used to the high house prices in the UK. For Bulgarians the price you paid is likely to be outrageously expensive.

If you want to possess a house, you can even get them for free in many countries...and regions...the run-down, secluded ones....In the UK, you even have to pay a lot for them, even if it is just the land it sits on - not in other countries.

What is the point of "owning" a house, just because you are able to afford it? If you speculate on property, you have to know, that all other countries apart from the UK have a completely different property market.

In all other countries, building land is never the problem...you can buy almost any piece of land and it is comparatively easy to get a planning permission.. Therefore house prices often loose in value - because they get older and most people would prefer to build a new one instead of buying a "second-hand" home with old building standards that are not evry energy efficient. The ONLY reason why house prices increase in the UK, althout the houses themselves get more and more dilapidated and do not meet any energy standards is that planning permissions are hard to get and building land itself it as expensive as land plus a house...and the population is growing (in other countries it is declining, so in the future more houses will be empty) - so in the UK there is an artificial ask-demand problem that drives house prices. Even a single law (of several possible laws, e.g. environmental or anti-speculation laws, new taxes...more planning permissions....laws against the building-mafia that are related to planning officers and make millions on plannig permissions alone) in the UK would
be sufficient to drop house prices enormously. But as most politicians also own houses themselves, this is not likely to happen...but still possible.

p.s.: I have seen Bulgarian building plots sold to people from the UK for 5,000 pounds...that were worth about 100 pounds at best. You really can not compare the housing marker in the UK with Bulgarian....it is like comparing apples with pears. Property is hardly ever a good investment - only in really few cases. You are only used to making money on property in the UK for the last 10 or 15 years....so everyone there has the feeling it was a safe and sound investment to buy a house....but once the house prices drop and people loose all their money, people will step back from those "money making schemes".

no. your wrong in a lot of ways. the first one being is not that every one is so greedy and selfcentred that they want to make money. I bought mine to live in. as have lots of others. What would you rather them do pay out of the nose here for a meagre mortgage that they can barely afford. or buy somewhere that they can live comfortably in. The food is cheap and a lot are living like kings off their pension. Were not all here just to invest. It is in a lot of ways a different way of life, and im sure that your views go down well with the ecenomically minded and the bunch who want to make a fast buck but that isnt always the case. I understand where youre coming from though. a lot are dilapidated and run down. not all though and it would be hard to pigeonhole that. Iyou seem to have got off on one for some reason. The population is certainly declining there. probably because theyre all coming here. but wouldnt that be a better time to buy All the local houses and create a new community, just a thought.