Swiss real estate bubble will ease, not pop - housing study

ZURICH (Reuters) - Switzerland's housing bubble has been gradually easing since January, averting the danger of house prices plummeting, according to an annual study published on Wednesday.

Housing prices are in focus ahead of the Swiss National Bank's quarterly monetary policy assessment in September, after Swiss bank UBS said this month that steps to shrink Switzerland's housing bubble were taking effect.

"We are seeing a cooling of the Swiss housing market," said Didier Sornette, professor at Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

The study, conducted in conjunction with comparis.ch, an Internet comparison shopping tool, said Switzerland will avoid a property crash despite persistently high housing prices.

For the first time since 2013, there were no areas deemed as critical, and the danger in nine districts that had shown a bubble in the last report, from January, had dispersed, it said.

The state provides no official data on the housing market.

Mortgage lenders, the Swiss government and the central bank are fighting high property prices -- fuelled by ultra-low interest rates, immigration and Switzerland's appeal as a safe haven for financial investors -- with a variety of supply- and demand-side measures.

At the SNB's last session in June, the central bank said there was no evidence of any sustainable easing in the mortgage and real estate markets and it would continue to monitor the situation closely.

(Reporting By Katharina Bart; editing by Crispian Balmer)