INSIGHTS

Here you can see at a glance which cities experienced positive, negative or no property price movements during the second half of 2011. Paris and Moscow proved the strongest performers, while price growth in Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong slowed down in the final six months.

In many cities, prices continued to outperform their domestic markets as global economic conditions prompted investors to seek safe havens for their money.

Despite several years of booming prices in the New World, the Old World cities outperformed their counterparts in the second half of 2011 due to their perceived stability.

This illustrates the residential price movements of the high-growth cities of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Mumbai between December 2005 and December 2011. Cooling measures designed to reduce property speculation in Hong Kong and Shanghai made themselves felt in 2011 compared with slowing domestic economies, leading to slowed price growth.

This graph clearly shows H1 vs H2 2011 difference between price growth in Old World and New World cities. Compared with both the Old World and global figures, the New World experienced the sharpest slowdown in price growth between the beginning and end of 2011.

As well as the "safe haven" factor, pricing in Old World cities has been sustained by a relative undersupply of stock in city centres.

The New World may offer more spectacular price growth - but with significant volatiliy.

The availability and cost of a weekend bolthole can be an important consideration in the business decisions of a busy executive.

This graph shows some of the interesting year-long variations in the global leisure home market. For instance, New York's top leisure destination, The Hamptons, saw a significant reversal of fortune in the final months of 2011.

This simply represents the slowdown in New World leisure property value growth in 2011, while indicating that their Old World counterparts were on an upward trajectory by the end of the year. Globally, there was a small overall growth in the market.

Trends for global, New World and Old World leisure property indices are broadly aligned with some outperformance in the New World, linked to strong price growth in the city residential markets until December 2010, where the Old World index dips slightly. However, there is a small pickup between June and December 2011.

This graph shows the relationship between the costs involved with buying, occupying and selling and the prices of these properties in each major city. Singapore, New York and Paris have the highest transaction and occupation costs, amounting to almost three per cent of total value annually.

Singapore's place in the graph is partly due to the recent introduction of an additional ten per cent stamp duty levy for foreign buyers, devised as a way of cooling speculation in the market.

This graph illustrates the additional costs associated with buying a property within a given city. While Singapore actually has a higher percentile cost to buy than Hong Kong, the latter takes the top spot due to the extremely high base price of property there. Interestingly, Moscow has virtually no purchase costs beyond a small registry fee.

Mumbai is the leader here, but this really reflects the extremely low cost of purchase in the city, while runner-up Singapore has both high purchase costs and base property costs.

*purchase costs are all of the costs, taxes and fees associated with buying a property and are additional to the purchase price

Representing the taxes foreign buyers can expect to pay in a city, this graph again shows the high cost of living in Hong Kong, Singapore and Paris. All three of these cities calculate property taxes as a percentage of the rateable value of the property. New York has no direct occupancy taxes, while Shanghai's rate applies to investment property only.

This graph presents the cost of renting in a given city. In some cities, like London, rental growth has surpassed capital value growth, resulting in greater investor interest in buy-to-let. For the first time, however, Paris overtook London as the most expensive place to rent a property.

The top of this graphic gives an at-a-glance indicator of global half-year rental growth patterns in the top 10 'World Class' cities. The last six months of 2011 saw growth for the rental sector, particularly in Shanghai, where landlords are anticipating greater rental yields in anticipation of weaker capital growth in the future.

Corporate demand is key to the sector, particularly in Shanghai where increasing numbers of secondments and rising budgets have fuelled rental increases.

The introduction of Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty in Singapore is likely to further benefit the rental market here. Rents grew by 5% in the second half of 2011, compared to 4.4% in the first half.

This chart simply displays the gross annual rent as a percentage of property values; New York is a clear leader here at almost seven per cent. The lower-yielding cities tend to be found in relatively new economies, where the market still has a high degree of volatility.

A representation of how long it takes before the cost of renting a property in a given city surpasses the costs associated with buying. In Moscow this takes just six months, while in Mumbai and Shanghai, where there are high transaction costs and relatively low rents, it takes more than four years.

The value of global billionaire property grew by 3.6 per cent in the second half of 2011, and this chart illustrates the cost per square foot for billionaire property, along with the average size of such properties in each city.

Singapore is beginning to rival London as a global centre of business, and consequently attracts buyers in the East in the same way that London does in the West. The number of Chinese buyers in Singapore has tripled since 2007, while London retains its reputation as a safe haven for investment - foreign buyers account for 43 per cent of all prime market transactions. What sets London apart from any other global city is the diversity of its overseas purchases, attracting business and residents from every part of the world.