Been seeing a lot of this around this subreddit. But is it the actual case or is this place an echo-chamber? I find house prices quite affordable actually. OECD data from 2015 indicates that house price to income ratio is lower than average OECD and EU countries (https://data.oecd.org/price/housing-prices.htm). Statista indicates similarly for 2019-2020 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1106669/house-price-to-income-ratio-europe/)
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That depends… what is your income? What do you need in a house? The number of bedrooms, a garden, a garage or carport, the location: all these affect the price.
Also, prices have risen immensely in the last 5 years.
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4710/993/400/Beat_Dead_Horse.jpg
No
My colleague is searching to buy a house and it’s been brutal. There’s so many people looking to buy a house now that the prices are getting high due to the “competition” on the market. On one of the house she offered more that they wanted in ad, and they ended up selling it to someone who offered more than 50k more than they wanted in the first place. So if you look at the price in an ad it often is not the final price of buying the house..
My house is worth +60/70k over the last few years. One of my friends bought his house for 20k two decades ago (a dump but still …).
I’d say it’s an actual issue.
Yes and no.
Are you comparing to the past? Then yes. Decades ago, every family bought a house by default. It was just a natural and affordable part of everyone’s lives — even for the lower class. Nowadays, houses are astronomically expensive in comparison, and so are rent prices.
Are you comparing to other countries with comparable population density? Then no, Belgium’s prices are not particularly high.
The long and the short of it is that the housing crisis is taking place pretty much everywhere in the West.
A lot of people forget that the interest rates of mortgages make a huge difference, those are dirt cheap compared to the past. Add in inflation, and the differences are already smaller. So yes, it is definitely more expensive than in the past, but not as much as many people believe it to be.
Also, the big problem for many buyers is not the monthly cost, but being able to provide the downpayment as those are calculated on the sale price.
20% down payment plus 12,5% registration fees plus notary fees and so on adds up. Then there’s the annuity. The nominal prices compared to salary might be lower than average, but that doesn’t make it cheaper to buy.
The place I live in now would have had a higher price where I’m from, but it would have been cheaper to buy it and it would have been cheaper to pay it off with the same interest rate and same maturity.
The main problem with buying a house for us isn’t the house price. It’s the down payment that banks are demanding nowadays to get a good loan.
Saving up for that down payment while renting is almost impossible unless you’re renting substantially lower than what you can afford.
Every country has regions that are more or less affordable. Average prices are meaningless.
Problem is that in the current market, people tend to overbid. So houses valued at 300K are being sold for 330-350K or even more depending on the region and so on.
Another problem is how fast prices are increasing. In my town you could have bought a decent 3 bedroom house with a garage and garden for 300K like 3-5 years ago. Today that could cost you 400K. That means that on a yearly basis, price increase is larger than what most people can save during the same period.