China overtook Hong Kong as the world’s hottest housing market in the first quarter, with prices rising at more than double the rate of anywhere else, property adviser Knight Frank LLP said.

Values soared 68 percent in China’s main cities from a year earlier, according to a global index compiled by the London- based broker. Gains for Hong Kong, India, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia helped lift average prices in the Asia- Pacific region by almost 18 percent.

China’s real estate market is being fueled by limited investment opportunities available to locals and the migration of rural Chinese to bigger cities, according to economists at Barclays Capital. The gains suggest that government efforts to curb property speculation through such measures as loan restrictions and larger down payment requirements haven’t yet deflated the market.

“The top four positions in our rankings are all occupied by Asia-Pacific locations, whilst Europe dominates the bottom half of the table,” said Liam Bailey, Knight Frank’s head of residential research. Twenty-five of the 47 countries in the index registered house-price growth. Declines slowed in the most depressed markets of the Baltic and Ukraine, he said.

China’s economy grew at the fastest pace in almost three years in the first quarter, boosted by Premier Wen Jiabao’s $586 billion stimulus package.

China’s prosperity has benefited the region. Property values rose almost 31 percent from a year earlier in Hong Kong, and increased 24 percent and 20 percent, respectively, in Singapore and Australia, Knight Frank said.

China’s ‘Bubble’

The “bubble” in China’s property market is going to burst very quickly, with prices set to fall as much as 20 percent in the next 12 to 18 months, Sun Mingchun, a Hong Kong-based economist at Nomura Holdings Inc., said in an interview yesterday.

China’s banking regulator said this week that it sees growing credit risks in the nation’s real-estate industry and warned of increasing pressure from non-performing loans.

Investment in real estate rose 38 percent to 1.39 trillion yuan ($204 billion) in the first five months of this year, according to China’s statistics bureau.

Most of the countries where home prices fell in Knight Frank’s global index were in Europe. Estonia was the worst performer, with a drop of 40 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, followed by Ukraine with a decline of almost 35 percent.

Values rose 8.8 percent in the U.K. and 2.3 percent in the U.S. In Dubai, which went from the world’s best performer to the worst during the global property slump, prices dropped 8.2 percent in the first quarter.

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/