I wrote this story. Thanks for reading. It is certainly not perfect but I hope it is useful. Would be good if our statistical authorities could read it and understand the data gaps that we face.
> Worse, the statistic counts rents and mortgage interest but not mortgage repayment. A household paying €1,500 a month on a mortgage - of which €400 is interest and €1,100 is principal - shows up as spending €400 on housing. The other €1,100, the part that actually hurts, is invisible.
This guy lost me here, with the assertion that increased equity "hurts" / vanishes.
Presumably its AI slop? It's certainly a lot of charts / "effort" that have gone into analyzing some random datasets with no real revelation or conclusion.
It surpises me that only 6% of "the Dutch" report that housing is a financial burden. Ask anyone here and they'll all agree the housing market is fucked and everything is way too expensive.
Statistics do not always match our personal experience. But it can still be "too expensive" while way better than it is happening in Portugal, Spain and France.
yes, but there are levels to the amount of mismatch
National averages are a terrible tool. Isolated per-country indexes are insufficient. No statistic is perfect, but the European authorities could - and should - try harder.
Forgot to point that I am the author of this data story.
This is what happens when you open your country to be bought by foreign "investors", as it happened with Portugal and Americans.
When you have countries much larger and wealthier than you, they will pump the housing market to unsustainability, driving the locals out of their houses.
But hey, GDP and the waiter wages have increased, so there's that.
Americans are experiencing much of the same despite being the richest country in... history. Immigration is a not insignificant part of it but real estate being the only thing most people can finance with leverage has serious footprint as well.
yeah in NL for example they have a "shortfall" of a million houses, due to overly strict regulations scaring off developers. 40% of new builds need to be social housing, and we have the strictest environmental regulation in europe. Developers prefer germany or the UK.
In the popular cities which is where everyone wants to live, it's quite low.
They've been full for quite a while, turns out land in desirable places is not infinite and there's no supply. So don't increase demand by allowing wealthy foreigners to buy out everything.
The inability to build fast mass transit is what keeps this so true. High speed rail into nearby towns could / should change the amount of land available but nobody builds it except the Chinese. And Americans don’t even consider it
> So don't increase demand by allowing wealthy foreigners to buy out everything.
I’m not sure about the effect of “wealthy foreigners” since if they are wealthy they are probably competing for more expensive properties that your school teacher or grocery store worker aren’t.
But you’re on to something here which isn’t being addressed which is the effect of mass migration to some of these countries. Obviously the migrant workers too want to and gravitate toward the cities with the most jobs, which would place additional pressure on housing prices since they join an already hyper competitive pool of buyers.
This guy lost me here, with the assertion that increased equity "hurts" / vanishes.
Presumably its AI slop? It's certainly a lot of charts / "effort" that have gone into analyzing some random datasets with no real revelation or conclusion.
They also often don’t match reality either.
yes, but there are levels to the amount of mismatch
National averages are a terrible tool. Isolated per-country indexes are insufficient. No statistic is perfect, but the European authorities could - and should - try harder.
Forgot to point that I am the author of this data story.
When you have countries much larger and wealthier than you, they will pump the housing market to unsustainability, driving the locals out of their houses.
But hey, GDP and the waiter wages have increased, so there's that.
They've been full for quite a while, turns out land in desirable places is not infinite and there's no supply. So don't increase demand by allowing wealthy foreigners to buy out everything.
I’m not sure about the effect of “wealthy foreigners” since if they are wealthy they are probably competing for more expensive properties that your school teacher or grocery store worker aren’t.
But you’re on to something here which isn’t being addressed which is the effect of mass migration to some of these countries. Obviously the migrant workers too want to and gravitate toward the cities with the most jobs, which would place additional pressure on housing prices since they join an already hyper competitive pool of buyers.