London Property Values Tied to Global Events

Jason Karaian, covering the new report for Quartz, first describes the well established outlier that is London’s housing market relative to the rest of the country: “For some time, property prices in London have disconnected from the UK as a whole; London homes are both the most expensive and fastest appreciating in the country. The average London house is now worth £441,000 ($724,000), versus the £248,000 national average.”

Karaian quotes the researchers directly to announce the report’s findings: “Our empirical results document that increases in political uncertainty in Southern Europe, China, Russia, and the Middle East are associated with well-identified increases in London house prices in specific wards.”

Providing a further layer of interpretation, buyers from different parts of the world will buy in different parts of town as a response to turmoil: “Turmoil in China, Russia, and the Middle East is strongly correlated with price rises in well-to-do London neighborhoods, while upheaval in Southern Europe and South Asia is more closely linked with price hikes in lower-income wards with a large share of residents from those regions.”