MacroScope

With a faltering economy, political gridlock, high interest rates, delayed monsoons and an epic power outage that has plunged half its 1.2 billion population into darkness, optimism is a sparse commodity in India.

Just not when it comes to rising house prices.

‘What goes up a lot must keep going up’ was the conclusion from the very first Reuters Indian housing market poll this week. And it sounded very familiar.

Past experience shows that respondents to housing market polls – whether they be independent analysts, mortgage brokers, chartered surveyors – tend to cling to an optimistic tone even as trouble clearly brews below the surface.

That was the case before the historic U.S. housing market crash that sent prices plummeting by more than a third and triggered the financial crisis. Five years later the market is still trying to find its footing.

Spin the globe over to South Asia.

India’s two biggest cities, Mumbai and Delhi, have become prohibitively expensive for average people to purchase property without stretching themselves financially. Average Indian house prices have doubled over the past five years.

On a recent trip home to Singapore, I was startled to learn just how much housing prices in the city-state have risen in my absence.

A cousin said he had recently paid over S$600,000 -- about US$465,000 -- for a yet-to-be-built 99-year-lease flat. Such numbers are hardly out of place in any major metropolis but this was for a state-subsidised three-bedroom apartment.

Soaring housing prices have fueled popular discontent -- little wonder as median monthly household incomes have stagnated at around S$5,000.

The outlook for the UK housing market has darkened again. The usually optimistic bunch of property market watchers polled by Reuters, who have tended to predict ever-rising property prices no matter what the season or financial climate, now say the market will move sideways for the next two years.

They say that in the next few months, the small double-dip in prices that has begun will continue. Modest gains predicted less than three months ago for this year and next essentially have been wiped away.

No one should be surprised by this.  It smacks of an awakening to reality more than a slight change to a few variables in the statistical model. What’s perhaps most striking about these new poll results is that economists think houses are even more overvalued now than they were in July even after a few straight months of falls.

As dust settles and investor morale improves, sovereign wealth funds are slowly coming back to the market.

But they are not going to simply repeat what they've done in the past few years -- hunting bargains in everything from property to banks. They are likely to carefully balance out the temptation for higher returns and the need to invest in strategic assets which benefit their own economies.

The so-called "south-south" trade is set to gather pace, providing much-needed capital inflows to emerging markets.