Residential property prices remained on a downward course in the third quarter of the year, as according to Bank of Greece data released the average price dropped by 7 per cent on an annual basis and completed a 7.8 per cent total decline in the first nine months of the year.
Property surveys conducted by banks for mortgage purposes amounted to just 4,219 in the July-September period – i.e. 6.1 per cent fewer than in the same quarter in 2013. This means that there were even fewer transactions, as property surveying concerns not only new mortgage loan issues but also the refinancing of some existing loans.
The central bank has also downwardly revised the data for the first two quarters of the year, as well as figures for 2013, which is evidence of the negative course of the housing market. The revised figures show that an annual decline of 10.9 per cent was recorded in home prices last year (up from an original estimate for 10.3 per cent), while prices dropped 8.8 per cent year-on-year in this year’s first quarter (from 7.5 per cent) and in the second quarter the revised decline came to 7.7 per cent (from 7.3 per cent).
The drop in the prices of newly-built homes (aged up to five years) reached 6.1 per cent, while older properties saw their prices drop by 7.5 per cent in the third quarter. In the year to end-September, the prices of new houses dropped 7.1 per cent while for older ones the drop was 8.3 per cent from the same period in 2013.
In geographical terms Athens has seen a considerably bigger decline than in other main cities, amounting to 9 per cent on a yearly basis in July-September, while the drop in Thessaloniki came to 6.5 per cent, in other major cities to 5.5 per cent and in the rest of the country to 4.6 per cent.