Belgium · asking prices

The market in

Brique reads what sellers ask for homes in Belgium, commune by commune. This issue covers listings observed from and compares them with the twelve months before, .

The ledger

The market in eight figures

Two rows, four measures. Each figure is the median of every listing observed in the window; the rule beneath it spans the twelve-month range of the national monthly series, with a brick tick at the latest month and a grey tick at the same month a year earlier.

against . Medians are of the listings observed in each window; the months with no listings recorded fall inside the current window, so its medians rest on observed months.

Prices

Price per square metre

Monthly medians for houses and apartments, by region. Price per square metre is the measure that travels: it removes most of the difference between a Walloon farmhouse and a Brussels maisonette, and it is what the rest of the bulletin uses when it compares places.

Change on the year by region

Rents

Median asking rent per month, by region, from rental listings. Apartments make up most of what is offered to rent; houses to rent are fewer, and outside the cities the monthly sample is thin.

Change on the year by region

Yield

Gross rental yield

The ledger's last column divides one asking price by another. It is a ratio of two markets, not the return on any one property, and it is read here as a way of comparing places rather than as a promise.

gross yield = 12 × median asking rent ÷ median asking price

At the figures above, a typical Belgian house asking and renting for returns a year before any costs; a typical apartment asking and renting for returns .

The ratio leaves out everything that follows the purchase: registration duty, notary fees, maintenance, months without a tenant and tax on the rent. It is also a market ratio, not a per-property return. The house that rents for is not the house that asks ; the two medians come from different listings in the same class and window.

A higher yield is not a better investment. Yields run high where prices are low, so the map of yields is largely the map of cheap communes, and a cheap commune can be cheap for reasons a tenant will notice. Geography maps gross yield commune by commune, with the sample behind each figure.

What was observed

Coverage

Listings were not recorded every day. The strip shows how much of each month was observed, and the same four hatched months appear on every time chart in this issue.