Prices of detached houses and building plots turn downwards

print this

After rising for many years in a row, the prices for plots of building land for detached homes have turned downwards.
      "A 12-year upward trend has now been broken", said Juhani Väänänen, an expert from the National Land Survey of Finland.
      Prices of parcels of land owned by individuals fell last year by 12% in Helsinki, by 13% in Espoo, and by 5% in Vantaa.
     
The prices of one-family houses fell in Espoo by around 1% and in Vantaa by 5%. In Helsinki they still struggled upwards, with a 2% increase recorded.
      The figures were released on Tuesday in a National Land Survey report.
      According to Väänänen, prices turned down from the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008. He noted that prices in the United States had started to decline already in the course of 2007, and by that time there was also a growing sense of economic uncertainty in Finland that eventually translated into a sliding market.
     
In numerical terms, the housing market had been contracting since 2005. In that year a record sum of 2.5 billion euros went into real estate deals in the Uusimaa region. Last year the figure was EUR 1.7 billion.
      Väänänen notes that the prices of both one-family homes and plots of land for building have risen so high in the Helsinki region that buyers were becoming hard to find.
      The current state of play is one of wait and see. There are no signs of panic selling, but the prediction is that prices will decline further unless there are some strong signals from abroad of economic recovery.


Links:
  National Land Survey of Finland

Helsingin Sanomat