This increase places Romania above the EU average which was +4.5% in terms of house prices. However, Romania is in the second half of the ranking, with the top spots being held by countries where house prices rose even by 16%.
In Bucharest alone, in the first three months of 2017, the average price of old three-room apartments rose from EUR80,400 in January to EUR81,900 in April, according to the real estate index of Ziarul Financiar, carried out in partnership with real estate consulting firm Coldwell Banker.
In the first half of 2017, apartment prices in Bucharest rose, on average, by EUR2,000, or 1.2%.
House prices, as measured by the House Price Index, rose by 4.0% in the euro area and by 4.5% in the EU in the first quarter of 2017 compared with the same quarter of the previous year. These figures come from Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union. Compared with the fourth quarter of 2016, house prices rose by 0.4% in the euro area and by 0.7% in the EU in the first quarter of 2017.
Among the Member States for which data are available, the highest annual increases in house prices in the first quarter of 2017 were recorded in the Czech Republic (+12.8%), Lithuania (+10.2%) and Latvia (+10.1%), while prices fell in Croatia (-0.4%) and Italy (-0.1%). Compared with the previous quarter, the highest increases were recorded in the Czech Republic (+2.9%), Latvia (+2.8%) and Sweden (+2.5%), and the largest decreases in Malta (-5.4%), Slovakia (-2.4%) and Cyprus (-1.4%).