Since the global financial crisis, quantitative easing (QE) has been extensively used in the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan, and their experience gives us some insight into the kind of impact that the ECB’s use of the monetary measure is likely to have on the European economy and its real estate markets.

Six years after QE programmes were first introduced, both the United States and the United Kingdom have benefited from positive growth indicators, including output, employment growth and private consumption. The scale of the latest stimulus plan in Europe — which quadruples the total assets purchased since the global financial crisis to €1.5 trillion — gives strong grounds to believe that the euro zone will also manifest marked improvements in economic growth. Already the consensus forecast for 2015 GDP has been revised up to 1.5 percent, from 1.1 percent four months ago.

Impact on European real estate markets

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