Rental Yields in Europe

Europe: Gross rental yields (%).

The gross annual rental income, expressed as a percentage of property purchase price. This is what a landlord can expect as return on his investment before taxes, maintenance fees and other costs.

The properties are usually apartments located in premier city center or other upmarket areas that our team believes to be attractive to the foreign buyer and investor.

The gross rental returns (or rental yields) figures published by the Global Property Guide are based on the Global Property Guides own proprietary in-house research.

Our research is based on median rental and sales prices, thus the average apartment can differ country by country, but is in most cases in a very habitable state and ready to be rented out.

We divide each region into 1-, 2-, 3, and 4+ bedroom properties in our research, but the table above represents the average yield percentage of each country. Click on individual countries if you wish to see more detailed data about that specific country.

Source: Global Property Guide Research

European statistics. European house price and other economic statistics vary in quality. It is often a surprise to non-Europeans to discover that swathes of this rich, highly developed continent are not covered by good housing statistics.

Northern European countries have generally good house price time-series. In particular, all the Scandinavian countries generate excellent house price statistics. In the Baltics the situation is improving rapidly. Latvia generates an official annual house price time-series, and the realtor Latio publishes a monthly index. Lithuania has no official house price or rents time-series, but the firm Inreal publishes annual prices and rents for Vilnius for a few years. Estonia has high-quality housing statistics, generated by the Statistical Office of Estonia (SOE). Data on house prices, house sales and construction activities, as well as general economics statistics are all available from the SOE.

Central Europe is mixed. German house price statistics are weak. France has very good statistics, the Netherlands has good data, Belgium and Austria have acceptable data. Spain has made giant strides, Portugal is weaker.

Southern Europe tends to have weak statistical data. There is a particular lack of housing statistics in Italy, Greece, and Turkey (though Italy has some private, for-sale, data generators).

Statistics in Eastern Europe are weak. Efforts are being made to change this, for instance Bulgaria began publishing a house price time-series in 2006. Aside from this, the Czech Republic has an official index, and in Poland, REAS Konsulting produces a for-sale index.