Is the global property bubble ready to burst? Residential global property has arguably been the most exciting investment of the past eight or nine years, but lately the fun has been draining away for expat mortgage holders. House and apartment prices have been driven sky high by rock bottom interest rates and there are growing signs that they cannot go any higher. Affordability has been stretched as far as it can go. Buyers are reluctant to part with their money at these levels. The days of double-digit annual house price increases appear to be over. The question now is whether the market is merely slowing, or whether it could go sharply into reverse. Is this a bubble, and if so, could it burst? Nothing lasts forever. London was the world’s No 1 property hot spot, but lately the luxury end of the market has slipped. Completed sales of newly-built flats in prime central London areas fell 41.4 per cent across 2016, according to figures from London Central Portfolio, while average prices for new builds also fell 8.7 per cent to £1.9 million (Dh9m). The very top end, for houses worth £5m or more, was worst affected with a 57 per cent fall in new build sales. However, prices across prime central London still rose 3.7 per cent, once sales of existing stock were also taken into account. The pattern of slowdown can be seen around the world in Knight Frank’s latest Prime Global Cities Index, which tracks the performance of luxury residential prices across key global cities for the period of March 2016 to March 2017. Its survey for the first quarter of this year showed that global property hot spots remain, with luxury prices in major Chinese cities Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou up on average 26.3 per cent, while