Owner-occupied houses became more expensive again last month than the month before and are now almost as expensive as a year ago, report the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) and the Land Registry. Buyers had to pay an average of 0.5 percent more money for a house in November than in October.
House prices in the still tight housing market have continued to rise every month since June. Earlier this year, prices fell, so that at one point houses were on average almost 6 percent cheaper than a year earlier. The annual decline has now fallen to 0.9 percent.
The previous price drop was mainly due to rising mortgage interest rates, which means that many people can borrow less to buy a house. But that effect now seems to be over, CBS chief economist Peter Hein van Mulligen noted in October.
What plays a role is that the supply of homes is extremely limited, as recently emerged from reports from Rabobank and ING. For example, few homes were put up for sale in recent quarters and the number of newly built homes is also declining. Bank specialists therefore predict a further increase in house prices in the coming year.
Experts have long pointed out that more houses urgently need to be built to solve the housing shortage in the Netherlands. As long as the shortage continues, this will probably have a driving effect on house prices. First-time buyers seem to suffer most from this, because they usually cannot offer much and therefore have very few houses to choose from. In forty years, first-time buyers who want to buy a house have not had as little chance on the housing market as they do now, mortgage provider BLG Wonen noted this week after its own research.
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