A surprising contender in Asia has unseated Dubai for the title of most luxury property growth.
According to Knight Frank’s new Wealth Report, Manila was the fastest-growing high-end real estate market in the world last year, Mansion Global first reported.
The capital of the Philippines, which is widely known as the densest city on Earth, outpaced the high-gloss Middle Eastern destination — which took the crown in Knight Frank’s last report — with its 26.3% reported annual price gains in upscale real estate.
Dubai, meanwhile, clocked in with 16% price growth, earning it the silver; the Bahamas, reporting 15% price growth, took the bronze.
In Portugal, the far-southern — and tourist-favorite — region known as the Algarve recorded a 12.3% increase, tying it with South Africa’s Cape Town for fourth and fifth place.
The report generally had positive things to say for the luxury residential market, which managed to come out on top even while facing significant headwinds from a global increase in cost of living and heightened interest rates, Mansion Global noted.
“At the start of 2023, economists were expecting a much weaker outcome across global residential property markets,” Knight Frank’s head of international residential and country research, Kate Everett-Allen, commented in the report. “Stock markets were heading for more pain, inflation was veering out of control, and the pandemic fueled property boom was set to end in tears as borrowing costs hit 15-year highs in some markets…However, that never happened — we’ve seen a much softer landing in terms of price performance around the world.”
Meanwhile, in New York and London, luxury prices declined.
The commercial sector also had a less rosy time of it, with global real estate investment down 46% to $698 billion last year, Reuters wrote of Knight Frank’s findings.
The persistence of the pandemic-born work-from-home trend, the report assessed, was largely to blame.