Azlan Othman
A new study placed Bandar Seri Begawan (BSB) in the top 10 most affordable cities for home buyers when taking into account yearly salaries and median home prices.
Buyers take 8.7 years to afford homes, according to global online lender NetCredit, which recently analysed over 800,000 online property listings for 73 global capitals and calculated the median house price for each city in total and per square metre.
Muscat and Pretoria also ranked highly. It takes 4.7 years in Muscat and Pretoria to buy a home, while it takes 6.9 years in Belfast in Northern Ireland, 7.6 years in Bucharest in Romania and 8.7 years in BSB, making them the five most affordable cities for home buyers.
The median house price in the Sultanate is USD175,015.
According to the research, a home in Monaco (USD52,000 per square metre) costs three times more than any other capital.
At the other end of the spectrum, the city with the least cost per square metre is Havana in Cuba (USD234 per square metre).
The most expensive capitals are a mix of small city-states and the capitals of small, medium and larger countries.
The top five are divided between Europe and Asia, while just USD30,000 separates the capitals of the United States and China in ninth and 10th position.
NetCredit said on a global scale, the property market is facing a difficult time. During the pandemic, prices rose quickly as people radically altered their idea of where and how they wanted to live.
However, with the fallout of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, global house prices are declining again.
Higher interest rates and the cost of living have reduced demand for houses, but a general shortage of properties on the market has prevented prices from bombing.
According to Oxford Economics, nearly all 38 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries are likely to see a slowdown in house price growth, with prices falling in more than half of them.
This would be the widest deceleration in housing price growth for over 22 years. According to the International Monetary Fund, real house prices could drop by 25 per cent in emerging markets over the next three years and by 10 per cent in advanced markets in the worst-case.
