Homeseekers desperate for increasingly rare homes under €200,000
The Dutch housing market has a big problem - supply does not meet demand. Home seekers showed the most interest in homes under 200,000 euros last year. However, only 9,000 such homes were on the market, which is 3.85 percent of the total supply, according to a data analysis by the housing site Funda.
In the category of over 700,000 euros, 35,000 homes were available for sale, about 15 percent of the total. However, home seekers had the least interest in that type of home. “With this data, you can see in black and white that there are unequal relationships between housing needs and the available supply throughout the Netherlands,” Funda director Joost Dop told AD. Funda analyzed the search behavior of millions of website visitors for its data.
On average, listed homes under 200,000 euros got the most responses in almost all of the Netherlands - approximately 4.64 responses per week per home. Only in Utrecht did homes between 300,000 and 400,000 get more responses than the cheaper category.
According to the home listing site, most first-time buyers (65 percent) don’t want to move somewhere else to buy their first home. They are attached to their city or region. About two-thirds of them are willing to make concessions on their housing needs and are willing to consider a smaller space or less ideal location, for example. However, the supply of small, affordable apartments is small.
Transitioners - people moving from one owner-occupied home to another - want to make fewer concessions and are willing to wait longer for their dream home. This group generally would like to live on one floor and showed more interest in apartments than houses. Funda listed 164,671 houses and 70,343 apartments for sale last year.
Affordability is a big issue in the Dutch housing market. A recent study by Calcassa showed that someone wanting to take out a mortgage for an average owner-occupied home has to earn almost 100,000 euros per year - more than twice the average income. ING expects home prices to increase further, by between 5 and 8 percent in the coming year.
