Housing statistics

Housing statistics 

Early days of the new year, so it's time for the statistics of the previous year. Concerning the built environment, the Dutch news is that house sales have continued to increase but less spectacularly, so specialists expect that it will soon even out. There have been so many sales recently that in many municipalities there are few houses available for sale and mortgage rates are expected to increase. By the way, everyone seems happy that house prices have increased once again.

These subjects have been integral parts of the national psyche as long as I can remember. With the Dutch system of mortgaged house ownership, it's not surprising that mortgage rates and conditions are important. Mortgage debt levels determine quite a lot for both the individual and the whole society. On the other hand, people do not seem to realise what growing housing prices for the entire building stock mean. If they keep going up, it's good - that's the general tenet and it's worrying that nobody seems to challenge its sanity.

As for buying and selling houses, real estate agents used to say that the average Dutch person moves house every seven years, not always for practical reasons like family extensions or job changes. It seemed like a self-stimulating system: let's buy each other's houses, especially as soon as more houses come on the market. Aspiration, advancement and improvement are apparently much more important than the cost and trouble involved - or is it simply that people get bored with what they have and go shopping for houses like they do for clothes?

Vintage buildings

Vintage buildings

One still sees hipsters around: beards, clothes and hats from bygone eras and from minority groups, at that. Cute and funny, mostly. I've always been in favour of beards, even if it's for the wrong reasons, and I've always had a soft spot for the 1950s, especially in terms of style. Those simplified yet elegant forms of furniture from that period had still remains a strong personal favourite. The clothes from the same period hold no appeal to me; I wouldn't buy them - and I wouldn't buy old stuff, second-hand or vintage, as the current euphemism goes (with a few exceptions like fountain pens).

'Vintage' suggests that the value of the thing increases or at least remains substantial. I could never see that with clothes, even if they weren't visibly worn. Second-hand clothes are just cheap - unlike vintage wine. The strange thing is that old buildings are treated like vintage. Value keeps increasing, as if demand never wanes and as if supply can never satisfy it. An old building may cost as much as a similar new one, even though the former may need more extensive and intensive maintenance (just think of energy-related performance). Prices tend to increase with any new development and drop only temporarily if a building is in a really bad state or the location becomes really uninviting - the equivalent of the bottom falling off a pair of trousers. However, if the building is repaired or the location improves, then prices go up again.

This reminds me of the sale of the former building of the Statistics Netherlands (CBS), the Dutch public statistics body: it was sold for only 6,4 million euro, while it was valued at 26 million, so quite a few people started crying scandal. The real scandal is that we value an old, hardly usable pair of trousers at 26 million - the price of a band-new, superior pair. And it's not just big buildings; the Netherlands is full of row houses, often quite old, that get sold and mortgaged for prices that are unquestioningly too high - and everyone seems to be glad about it.

The Minister answers questions about the sale of the CBS building

A major Dutch newspaper reports on the housing market in 2016