Reuters) - Debt-laden euro zone countries hoping to sell state-owned property must cut prices and establish more transparent sales programmes to boost the slow trickle of transactions to date, research showed. 

While European governments more than doubled real estate sales to 2.3 billion euros ($3 billion) last year to cut debt in the wake of the financial crisis, they were dominated by more robust economies like Germany and the UK, a report by property consultancy CBRE said.

 

Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland, the five nations most debilitated by the sovereign debt crisis, together accounted for less than one percent of the total, CBRE director of research Richard Holberton said.