Buy a home in Monaco and you'll enjoy iconic beaches, glamorous casinos, a renowned arts and music scene, pulsating nightlife and boutique-packed boulevards.
You'll also pay for it.
That's because the Mediterranean principality tops our list of the world's most overpriced real estate markets. The rankings were compiled by calculating an effective annualised rate of return on a property based on annual cash flows derived from renting and adjusted for capital gains tax, transaction fees, operating costs and maintenance, appreciation and inflation. We then flipped the return rate to resemble the more familiar price-to-earnings (P/E) measure.
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Monaco's housing market earned a P/E ratio of 74.07. What's more, the well-earned moniker of "tax haven" apparently doesn't apply to transaction costs, which rack up to a 20 per cent premium when buying and selling a property.
Rome landed at No. 2 with a P/E of 50.51; it's a slow growth market, which remains very expensive. Representing North America in the world's top 10 were Los Angeles (5th place at 26.88) and Vancouver (6th at 26.81).
The relationship between rental yields and housing costs matters because a low rental yield is a good indication of a stretched market--one that has a bubble--since these markets are more likely to face downward price pressures or grow at a slower rate.
Possible higher returns attracts more buyers and pushes up prices. India's disparate markets illustrate this. Bangalore has a 9.7 per cent rental yield helping it to an 8.74 P/E, a good sign the market has room to grow. Last year prices climbed there by 16.5 per cent. Mumbai, which posted a P/E of 17.21 per cent, saw prices grow 6.6 per cent.
Behind the numbers
To arrive at our numbers, we inverted the effective annualized rate of return so each figure resembled a price-to-earnings measure that was easier to read. Think about each market like you would a stock: the higher the price-to-earnings figure, the more you have to pay to get one dollar of return.
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Many of the world's most expensive markets, such as London and New York, didn't make the top 10, and were beaten out by less expensive markets that had lower yields and smaller rates of appreciation.
We measured 50 financial capitals in every continent except Antarctica. For the most part this meant one city from each country--London for Great Britain, Bangkok for Thailand, Warsaw for Poland--but for countries like India, China, the US, Australia, Canada and Switzerland where there were multiple, distinct financial centers we measured a variety of cities: Geneva and Zurich in Switzerland and Shanghai and Beijing in China, for example.
Our valuations were based on data from GlobalPropertyGuide.com, an international real estate research firm. For each market, it assumed no debt financing; a constant cost of capital as the buyer wouldn't shift funds based on where they buy; a 10-year hold of the property and that the property would be a nonprimary residence.
Pricing data were based on city center properties of equivalent size. An investor looking to buy in Rio de Janeiro likely doesn't consider Rio's favelas viable options, so data skewed by that cut of the housing stock isn't useful. In basing the numbers on the prime cut of housing markets from Kiev to Manhattan, the resultant valuations are more comparable as investment options.
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Purchase costs included transaction costs. In Geneva, that represents an effective 0.36 per cent hike on the paid price, while in Seoul, buyers pay 20.88 per cent above the property's base. Here, for example, transaction fees include housing bonds, legal fees, registration tax, acquisition tax, estate agent's commission, education tax, stamp duty and a special tax for rural development. Suddenly, a $500,000 apartment has a real cost of $604,400.
Yearly operating costs and maintenance were valued at 10 per cent of rental yields across markets, a standard estimation in pricing calculations. Projections for the future value of the home were calculated by annually compounding the original capital value based on each respective country's five-year average trailing gross domestic product growth rate and inflation, as calculated by the International Monetary Fund, which has a good rate of correlation to housing price growth.
Cash flows were predicted by the annual rental yield minus operating costs and maintenance. Bangalore had the highest rental yield. There, landlords can command a 9.7 per cent return per year on the value of their property something that undoubtedly stokes the jealousy of countrymen in Mumbai, where the strict rent controls of the local Maharashtra Rent Act beat rental yields down to 3.27 per cent.
After 10 years, when it came time to sell, we tacked on capital gains taxes and sellers' costs--something that's a serious headache in Moscow, where sellers' costs amount to 18 per cent of the sales price; far better to live west of Russia in Latvia, where sellers' costs are 3 per cent and capital gains nil.
As NYU Stern School of Business finance professors Anjolein Schmeits and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh point out, this system of calculation doesn't discount for risk and volatility. For the purposes of this article we decided not to adjust for these elements in part because many of the markets have undergone such dramatic transformations in the last 10 years that calculating a beta rating--what an economist would use to measure an asset's volatility against the market--wouldn't accurately represent the housing markets of rapidly developing countries like India or Latvia, for example.
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