The only thing that seems to be sure about the international property market at the moment is that the emerging markets continue to gain ground while the conventional markets continue to flounder.
According to the S&P indexes, property markets from emerging countries ended up gaining 46.2% over the 2007 year while conventional markets fell 4.8%. That kind of contrast is sufficient to illustrate the point about the strength of emerging markets, but at the same time it is just one of many that illustrate the same thing.
For example, S&P tracked the North American property index falling 16% and the European index falling 25.7% at the same time they were able to track the Asian property index gaining 12.9% in the final three months of 2007.
While it is true that emerging markets because of the lack of development tend to be fickle and therefore are prone to large increases that developed markets could never hope to match, at the same time the consistency of the gains of emerging markets and the losses of developed markets shows that the trend is far stronger than just simple market fluctuation.
This has resulted in a number of different people considering what the best strategy is concerning investment in developed property markets. According to most analysts, the appropriate investment strategy to follow would be to invest now rather than later. This may be counterintuitive, but it is borne out by the numbers.
Recent figures on developed housing markets seem to indicate that waiting until the downtrend has passed to invest is a risky decision and one that might end up costing investors over the long run. In other words, many analysts believe that is a property investor is going to invest in a developed country any time soon, they should do it now rather than later.
