The credit crunch has triggered property price falls in nearly every housing market across the world, with the UK seeing some of the steepest drops, research showed today.

As it was announced that house prices fell by a further 2.3% last month, the figures from estate agents Knight Frank revealed around 81% of countries recorded falls in the value of property in the final quarter of last year, compared with just 27% in 2007.

The group said it was now clear no market would escape unscathed from the global financial crisis, although the impact would vary according to the housing markets and underlying economies of individual countries.

The UK recorded the second steepest annual price declines out of the 42 countries Knight Frank looked at.

House prices fell by 14.7% in the UK during 2008, with 5.1% of the slide coming during the final quarter of the year.

The group said not all markets were at the same point in the cycle, with 19% of the countries it looked at still seeing price rises in the final three months of 2008.

But it added that although house prices rose by more than 10% last year in seven countries, values had now started to fall in six of them.

Dubai was the strongest performer during 2008, with house prices soaring by nearly 60% during the year, but much of this gain is expected to be wiped out in 2009.

At the other end of the scale, Latvia saw the steepest price slides on both an annual and quarterly basis, with homes dropping by 16% in the final three months of the year and plummeting by 33.5% during the whole of 2008.

Iceland also suffered badly, with prices falling by 14% during the year, with 11.3% of the slide coming in the final quarter following the collapse of its banking sector.

The United States and Ireland were both also near the top of the fallers' table with annual price drops of 12.1% and 9.1% respectively.

Nicholas Barnes, head of international residential research at Knight Frank, said: "The current downturn is unlike any other we have ever witnessed in both scale and causes.

"This year is likely to be more difficult than 2008, however, there is a 'consensus of hope' that the trough of the current cycle will be reached in 2009, although a bounce-back is not anticipated and the current fragility of markets could be exposed by further bad news from the financial sector or indeed the underlying economies.

"At some point, however, buyers will decide that price falls in many markets represent once-in-a-generation opportunities that are too good to pass up."