Katharina Knoll, Moritz Schularick, Thomas Steger provide a great overview and analysis of historical house prices around the world: http://www.dallasfed.org/assets/documents/institute/wpapers/2014/0208.pdf
They find that “house prices in most industrial economies stayed constant in real terms from the 19th to the mid-20th century, but rose sharply in recent decades.”
