The Economist recently published the following chart alongside this article talking about the impact of foreign buyers on global house prices.

They also have this set of interactive graphs that allows you to chart prices according to a number of different measures. The two metrics that The Economist focuses on (above) are house prices against rents and house prices against incomes. 

The argument they make is that as (foreign) capital begins to think of property as merely a bolthole, it can start to detach itself from fundamentals such as rents and incomes. New Zealand, Canada, and Australia are specifically called out.

This isn’t necessarily news. And one chart can only tell you so much. But I like staying on top of the various indices.

Every year for the last decade, Knight Frank has published something called The Wealth Report. I’ve written about it before, but it’s basically a look at “prime property” and global wealth.

As part of the report, they have something called the PIRI 100. It’s their “Prime International Residential Index”, which looks at luxury residential property prices around the world. They generally define “prime property” as being the top 5% of each market according to value.

This year, the top 25 locations in their PIRI 100 are as follows (for the most part, the data is up to December 2015):

Here in Canada, we like to talk about the insanity of the Vancouver and Toronto real estate markets. This list helps to put that into perspective. Even by global standards, Vancouver is at the top of the pack by quite a significant margin. 

It’s worth noting that since this is a “prime property” index, it’s pretty safe to assume that the buyer profiles for these sorts of properties would have a significant international bias. So in a way, this list is really about global capital flows.

Here are the bottom 10 locations on this year’s list:

If you’d like to see the full list, click here.