Home seekers, sellers expect more overbidding on Dutch housing market: Funda

Both potential buyers and sellers in the Dutch housing market expect overbidding to increase in the coming period, reported Funda, the Netherlands’ main site for people looking to buy or sell a home. Sellers have regained some confidence in the market, and more than half think now is a good time to put their homes on the market, according to Funda’s quarterly survey of people who visit the site.

As home prices start to tick up again, more people expect overbidding to return to the market. A third (32 percent) of buyers and sellers expect that overbidding will be the norm again within a few months, compared to only 12 percent six months ago. The realtors’ association NVM recently confirmed that expectation, reporting that 45 percent of homes sold in the third quarter were sold above the asking price. 60 percent of Funda’s respondents said that the current housing supply is very limited - a perception that may increase overbidding as home seekers become desperate to find a home.

Some 54 percent of respondents think it is currently a better time to list than six months from now, while 43 percent think that the market conditions will still be favorable in six months’ time. Funda did not look into the reasons for these convictions, but over the past months, there have been several headlines about big organizations wanting to sell their rentals in the Netherlands due to government plans to regulate part of the free market, among other things. Earlier on Thursday, Pararius also reported that more landlords were putting their private-sector rentals on the owner-occupied market. It may be that sellers want to get ahead of that influx.

The Funda study also showed that buyers increasingly consider a good energy label a vital part of their new home. 56 percent of respondents said they would not buy a home with an energy label lower than C, and 27 percent said they now consider the energy label more important than six months ago.

From next year, Dutch mortgage providers will also be allowed to take a home’s energy label into account for the mortgage and offer higher loans for more sustainable homes. The idea is that a sustainable home will have a lower energy bill, and the owner can, therefore, afford a higher premium. However, experts warned that this measure might create a division in the housing market where sellers will find it increasingly difficult to sell their low-energy label homes for a reasonable price. During the recent dip in the housing market, the prices for homes with a low energy label already fell faster than sustainable homes’, Statistics Netherlands reported.

Funda’s survey suggests the housing market is not quite at that point yet. 17 percent of respondents said a green energy label wasn’t a requirement for them, and 61 percent said they were willing to make their new home more sustainable. The new mortgage guidelines also state that the buyer of a low-energy label home can borrow up to 20,000 euros extra to finance sustainability improvements.