Housing prices in the European Union picked up in the first quarter of 2018 compared to the same quarter last year. In Croatia, the increase was even more marked, according to the latest data released by the EU statistics bureau Eurostat on Wednesday.

In the first three months of 2018, house prices, as measured by the House Price Index, rose by 4.7 percent on the EU level compared with the same quarter of 2017, indicating accelerating growth, as in the last quarter of 2017 house prices had increased by 4.5 year-on-year in the EU.

By country, the highest average year-on-year increases in Q1 2018 were in Latvia (13.7 percent), Slovenia (13.4 percent), Ireland (12.3 percent) and Portugal (12.2 percent). Meanwhile, the prices fell slightly only in Sweden and Italy (by 0.4 percent in each), as well as in Finland (0.1 percent).

In Croatia, house prices in the first quarter of 2018 were up by 8.5 percent compared to the same period in 2017. In Q4 2017, they went up by 7.6 percent year-on-year.

Compared with Q4 2017, house prices increased by 0.7 percent in the EU.

The highest quarter-on-quarter increases were recorded in Latvia (7.5 percent), Hungary and Slovenia (4.4 percent) and in Portugal (3.7 percent), while the largest price drops were in Malta (4.7 percent), Cyprus (1.8 percent) and Sweden (0.8 percent).

In Croatia, house prices in Q1 2018 increased by 0.9 percent quarter-on-quarter, indicating slowing down of the growth in prices, as they had jumped by 3.2 percent in Q4 2017 quarter-on-quarter.

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