Where in the world has the property boom gone?

GlobalValuesIt may be over here, but there are property booms going on from Brazil to Baghdad. Frances O'Rourkelooks at places where prices are rocketing up

'Soaring prices. Precious few homes. Bidding wars. Sound like the real estate market a few years back? Welcome to an unexpected bright spot in the global housing slump: Baghdad.

"Lured by news of decreased violence, thousands of displaced Iraqis returning to Baghdad's safer neighbourhoods are fuelling a bit of a real estate frenzy."

It's always boomtime somewhere, as this recent report in the Los Angeles Times shows.

In Salvador in northern Brazil, prices in new developments have shot up 50 per cent in the past two years, with feverish talk of Gordon Ramsay cookery schools, David Beckham football academies and a Reubens Barricello racetrack.

Closer to home, Montenegro is hot and getting hotter - prices of new developments there are predicted to rise by about 25 per cent in the next year or so.

And even in Cuba (see below) - where it's illegal to buy and sell property - there's an underground boom: black market prices for homes are rising there as people try to get hold of historic homes, anticipating the time when private property is legalised.

But back to Baghdad. House prices fell last year as Iraqis fled violence in the city - now prices are doubling in some neighbourhoods. News of a reduction in violence has brought 67,000 Iraqis back to Baghdad since last September. And prices are doubling in certain neighbourhoods.

The smallest homes are the quickest to sell, says the LA Times, gone almost as soon as they hit the market, sometimes with multiple bidders.

A 70sq m (750sq ft) home that is in a lower-middle-class neighbourhood costs around €100,000. But one local agent also has a stock of homes costing over €2 million. These massive compounds, with marble floors, sparkling chandeliers and, unsurprisingly, state-of-the-art security systems, are also in demand - although prices for these have risen by a more-modest-than-average 10 to 15 per cent in recent months.

Moscow is another city that's experienced a boom - not surprising, given that wealthy Russians are behind rapid price rises around the world. (London, the Riviera, the costas in Spain).

Cranes are nearly as permanent a fixture on the Moscow skyline now as the cupolas of Orthodox churches and Russians grown rich in financial services and the like are paying big prices. A new one-bed 81sq m (871sq ft) apartment in a fashionable downtown district sold for €1.4 million recently. And prices for some ritzy homes near Red Square - new apartments with spas, concierges and screening rooms - were up by 79 per cent in 2007. A typical 65sq m (700sq ft) three-room apartment now costs over €1 million.

Jerry Oates, managing director of Knight Frank for Russia and the CIS, agrees that the boom in Moscow might be tailing off a little - price growth rates of 40 per cent a year are falling to around 25 per cent - but general confidence in the economy means that the boom is now moving on to the "Millionski" cities - cities with populations of around a million. These include places you might want to look up on a map, such as Sochi, Novosbirsk and Yekaterinburg.

Outside Russia, another city to watch is Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, where the residential market is booming, says Oates.

And what about Moldova, where a boom in capital Chisinau has seen apartment prices jumping annually by 50 per cent for the past three years? However, they're predicted to fall to a mere 20 per cent rate of increase this year, according to Global Property Guide website.

That's about the same rate of house price rise Monaco enjoyed last year, says Liam Bailey, head of residential research at Knight Frank in London. And although Monaco outperformed the rest of the Riviera in 2007, Harry Lewis of Savills predicts that new Riviera developments from St Tropez to Antibes to Monaco will be looking for 25 per cent over today's market rates in the next two years.

Lewis, director of International Residential, says this is because of continued demand, lack of supply and, yes, Russian money.

If Baghdad and Moldova aren't the first places you'd expect to find a property boom, world capitals like London and New York are. Both cities have had fluctuating markets in recent years and London generally is slowing down - but not at the very top end of the market, according to Knight Frank's Liam Bailey.

While the prime market of £1 million to £5 million (€1.3m-€6.7m) properties is slowing, "those costing above £10 million (€13.4m) - in places like Belgravia, Mayfair, Knightsbridge and Chelsea - are doing well". The top price paid for a London home is about £50 million (€67m).

And in New York, Manhattan - particularly apartments close to Central Park - have enjoyed a mini-boom in the past six months. New York generally had a downturn before the rest of the US and is recovering sooner, says Bailey.

Apartments there now cost around $4,000 (€2,700) per sq ft, making, say, an 83.6sq m (900sq ft) apartment costs about $3.6 million (€2.4m).

Then there's Munich, which is enjoying growth in a country which "has done nothing in the past 10 years". Price growth there is now around a modest 10 per cent a year.

There are booms and booms of of course and one obviously isn't just like another. But a quick look at a review of global trends shows that Europe and the US fared worse as far as growth goes, with prices picking up in Asia-Pacific. Singapore, for example, was the top performing market, with an annual house price rise of around 25 per cent. So where to from here: clearly Ireland won't have another boom for a while. Where will?

It could be Cambodia, where property prices have been climbing for the past few years, now that China's closed to foreign investment.

Or look out for Bratislava in Slovakia which, along with Bulgaria, Shanghai, and Tallinn in Estonia also had price rises of between 20 and 30 per cent last year.

Or perhaps Jordan, where the royal family is determined to create growth by building a massive development on the Dead Sea.

Bartering - and betting on a boom in Cuba

Virtually every square foot of Havana is owned by the socialist state - but the people of Havana are as obsessed with real estate as we are, Jose Goitia of The New York Times reported recently in an article on the bustling underground market in homes and apartments in Cuba's capital.

Insiders say prices are on the rise as people try to get their hands on historic homes (like the colonial one, right) in anticipation of a time when private property may return to Cuba. Exiles in Miami are also sending money to relatives on the island to help them upgrade their homes.

Officially, buying or selling property is forbidden. But the island has a dire housing shortage, despite government-sponsored new construction. Many Cubans upgrade their surroundings through a decades-old bartering scheme known in Cuban slang as permuta. People gather every Saturday on one of Havana's grand avenues to arrange trades. A woman looking for a first floor unit to swap for her third-floor apartment says she likes the system better than the one in the US, where her son living in Florida fears foreclosure.

But a man who is renovating a historic home in old Havana is getting ready for the change that is likely to come when Fidel Castro dies. He has researched its ownership, to avoid a court battle in post-Castro Cuba and is buying up old chandeliers and furnishings. He estimates its current worth at $20,000 (€13,675), a mint in a country where monthly government salaries can be one one-thousandth of that. If private property ever comes to Cuba, he estimates the price will most likely multiply by five.