While America's housing market cools, property elsewhere is still hot.IN MANY countries, people are showing little sign of losing their appetite for residential property. Although the pace in several of the raciest markets around the world has eased a bit in the last quarter, prices have risen by more than 10% in the past year in eight of the countries in our table. The Economist has been collating these house-price indicators since 2002, allowing us to track the global residential-property boom (see chart).
However, in America the steam has come out of the housing market. In the year to the third quarter, the index of house prices compiled by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), a regulator, rose by 7.7%, the smallest year-on-year increase for three years. In the quarter itself, prices rose by only 0.9%, the weakest for more than eight years.
