2014-12-08

Ukraine Property Prices Down approx 83% from Peak


In 2010, when I wrote a post titled: Massive inflationary booms always end in tears induced by the resulting deflationary bust — Here's the case of Ukraine. I had concluded that:
Prices will have to decline by 82% from the 2007 top to reach the 2002 levels, after a 562% boom. As corrections are always overdone, I wouldn't be surprised to see a 90% decline. Remember: if you buy an asset after a 80% decline, but that the actual peak to trough is 90%, you loose 50% on your investment.
Ukraine is just another story of inflationary boom from a corrupt political class that allowed banks to push credit so much without any of the limits that a Free Market would impose. The resulting deflationary bust is going to be extremely hard, specially since the global economy is also falling into the abyss. There isn't going to be any exogenous support possible...
Remember that By March 2010 Kiev house prices had dropped 40.5% from their August 2008 peak

By 2012, prices had dropped by about 50% from the peak:
The housing market has been in a downward spiral since the global financial crisis, making Kiev a buyers’ market. “Since 2008, prices have fallen twice,” said Igor Darmogray, a lawyer in the Kiev office of the Berlin firm Werner & Partners. “Two years ago, the prices were simply unimaginable, they were extremely high. The apartments which cost $1 million, now it’s difficult to sell them at $500,000.”

According to the data found on this page, the second leg of the price collapse has started as is even more violent that the first one, with prices crashing by about 30% just in Q2 and Q3, in nominal terms:


Now, add to the fact that the local currency, the Hryvnia has also crashed by about 50% against the USD in the past 12 months alone, and you'll get a picture of the devastation that has happened in the property prices of Ukraine.

Quoting Mish
Since November 30, 2013, the Hryvnia has gone from 8.15-per-US$ to 15.34-per-US$. That's a decline of 46.87% in just over a year.
With the very little details I have been able to find, we can try to do some basic calculations, starting from a price of 100 in 2008, the price would have been about 50 in 2012. They dropped another 30 odd percents in 2014 after staying relatively flat in 2013. So we're now at 35. Finally, accounting for a 50% drop in the currency against the USD, it means that in USD terms, the prices is now about 17. This is an 83% drop in property prices in a bout 6 years, and there's still room for further drops, since Q4 2014 should also mark a decline given the situation in Ukraine. I wouldn't buy yet, but prices should now start looking attractive.

Of course, some will argue that with civil war in Ukraine, it's expected for the prices to have fallen so much and that nobody could have forecast that. This would be wrong. It would be easy to argue but difficult to convince that war is a consequence of economic depression and not the other way around. Should Ukraine be a country with a booming economy, chances are none of the clashes and wars would have started in the first place.

This is my thesis, and this is why it is possible to forecast the price drop without knowing which event will trigger the crash.

No comments: