This year San Francisco replaces New York City in the top spot as the most expensive market for new construction, with costs having increased by 5.0 percent in the past year, according to Turner and Townsend’s International construction market survey 2019. London, Zurich and Hong Kong round out the survey’s top five cities.
Low construction costs in Chinese and Indian cities are not much of a surprise, having been in this position in previous surveys. However, Istanbul continues to surprise by having such low construction costs. The Turkish lira has fallen from close to $0.50 to $0.19 since 2015, which helps explain the dramatically low construction costs when converted back to U.S. dollars.
The overall spread of average construction costs is remarkable and increasing. Bangalore costs are just 13 percent of those in San
