Second-quarter results for Knight Frank’s Global Residential Cities Index show an average 5.5% rise globally in urban house prices in the year to June 2016. Six Chinese cities (Shenzen, Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, Guangzhou and Hangzhou) appear in the top ten with Shenzen leading the rankings, due in part to its rapidly expanding technology sector.

Data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics report that the average annual growth for the top ten Chinese cities equates to 22% in the year to June, despite growth being -1.1% for the same cities a year earlier.

Kate Everett-Allen from Knight Frank comments: “A number of the municipal governments in China are now introducing a new raft of stringent cooling measures at a local level to dampen dales, these range from limiting non-locals to single home purchases and tightening rules for local residents in relation to second home purchases.”

Looking to Europe, Budapest ranked in fourth place and was the European city with the strongest price growth at 24% in the year to June. Moscow placed at the bottom of the list in this quarter’s results, showing a negative growth of 11%, closely followed by Jaipur with negative growth of 10%. Other cities at the bottom include Sevilla (-7.9%), Aberdeen (-6.2%) and Perth, Australia (-4.8%).