‘Light breeze’ over the housing market: will house prices collapse after all?

Light breeze over the housing market will house prices collapse
In recent years, the housing market has been almost completely shut down. Quarter after quarter, house prices appeared to be rising again, for both owner-occupied and private rental properties. If you hope for a social rental home, you have to be patient: in Utrecht you wait an average of 13 years for such a home.

There are many factors at play when it comes to the high house prices in the owner-occupied sector. In recent years, for example, the low mortgage interest rate meant that people were able to borrow more and more from the bank. Government measures, such as the much-discussed ‘jubelton’ and the abolition of the transfer tax for first-time buyers, also ensured that interested buyers could offer more money for a home. Now that mortgage interest rates are rising, inflation and energy prices are rising and the government is more frequently intervening in the housing market, the overheated housing market appears to be cooling off somewhat, several brokers have concluded.

In addition to such external factors, the housing market is of course also ‘simply’ a matter of supply and demand. In recent years, the demand for housing has exceeded the supply many times over. The result: higher prices. Supply and demand are still quite out of balance, conclude the brokers whom RTV Utrecht spoke to for this story. They do not expect a significant dip in prices (for the time being).

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