The overheated housing market once again set a record in August. Existing owner-occupied homes were 17.8 percent more expensive than a year earlier. As a result, house prices rose even faster then in july. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), the price increase in August is the largest since September 2000.
Over the past six months, the prices of owner-occupied homes have risen time and again new record highs. A house is now on average 78 percent more expensive than in 2013. In that year house prices reached a low point.
Fewer homes changed hands in August, as is usual in the summer. The number of sales fell by 9 percent to 17,257 transactions.
Billion euros
Yesterday the cabinet confirmed that for the next 10 years 100 million a year invests in the construction of 900,000 homes. In total, this amounts to one billion euros.
In the Speech from the Throne King Willem-Alexander mentioned the housing market as one of the major domestic issues to be addressed. Many parties from the House of Representatives seized the opportunity of Prinsjesdag to say one more time that there will soon be a missionary cabinet has to come. Only then, according to them, can the problems mentioned by the king, such as the housing shortage, be properly addressed.
‘Houses not for princes’
On Sunday 12 September there was a housing protest in Amsterdam’s Westerpark. Thousands of opponents of the current housing policy spoke out against the exploding house prices, rising rents in the private sector and the shortage of social housing.
The activists walked with signs with texts such as ‘Houses for people, not for princes’ and ‘Landlords function elsewhere’. The participants also jointly chant slogans such as ‘people above the market’ and ‘Fuck the housing market’.
NOS op 3 explains in the video below what possible solutions are for the crisis in the housing market.
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