The numbers, which were approved based on the information about the effective prices of transactions from the SIR - Residential Information System, show that the result achieved at the end of the year was highly influenced by the behavior of the months of June and December, during which the monthly rise prices reached 2.4% and 1.6%, respectively, the highest increases of the year.
According to Ci, prices have been rising “uninterruptedly over the past 18 months”, whereby the last comparable series of valuations took place between the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2005, in a cycle of 26 consecutive months of growth of the sale price of the house. However, in this period the prices variations were more restraint, always below the 1.5%, in an accumulated increase of 2.1%.
But since July 2016 the cumulative increase is 16.3%, which shows the process of market recovery started in the first half of 2013, before which prices had already fallen 21.7%.
Ricardo Guimarães, director of the Ci, explains that "the annual rate of December 2017 is not only the highest of the current century, as it is necessary to go back more than 25 years, more concretely to July 1992, to find an equivalent record. And so, by the end of 2017, prices are 0.9% below the peak reached in the market, which happened more than ten years ago in September 2007".
He also says that “in spite of this noticeable recovery, we must be able to see the results in the light of what would have been a natural evolution of prices, ie whether the market had followed a recovery path according to the inflation rate (ie zero real valuation) , not having been hit by the sovereign debt crisis. In this scenario, prices would now be around 13.6% above what is that actually observed".
Since March 2002 housing prices have been moving below the inflation rate. Despite the nominal rise in prices, their evolution in real terms (minus the effect of inflation) has almost always been declining since then, with the exception of the periods between mid-2005 and 2006 and mid-2007 to mid-2008. October rose again above inflation, below the point where it would have been if there had been no price depression due to the crisis.