News

City centres have become increasingly busier, and the pressure on the sometimes several centuries-old infrastructure is growing, for example due to freight traffic. Many municipalities in the Netherlands face major maintenance challenges, with costs running into billions of euros. Furthermore, the changes in the short term come on top of major transitions in the area of climate adaptation, circularity, energy and transport.

The number of mortgage applications reached a new record in the first quarter of 2022 due to an enormous increase in the number of refinancings of existing mortgages. Consumers are thus anticipating the first increases in mortgage interest rates. However, this rise in interest rates in the first three months of 2022 has also had an impact on the maximum borrowing capacity of households.

Many of the outdated typical Dutch tenement flats are large consumers of energy and therefore often end up on the demolition list. However, these typical flats do not have to disappear from the city scene. Symbiotic Urban Movement (SUM) - a team of students from Delft University of Technology - has developed a plan to sustainably transform all 847,000 tenement flats in the Netherlands and create more housing.

Master's student Joep Bastiaans made an inventory of recently developed collaborative housing concepts for seniors and investigated to what extent these meet their needs and wishes. His Master's thesis 'Professional collaborative housing concepts for seniors' won the Jeroen van der Veer Thesis Award 2021.

Insufficient supply of new and existing owner-occupied homes is the main reason for the once again enormous rise in house prices in the fourth quarter of 2021. A declining number of house sales and increasing numbers of first-time buyers and middle-income households being sidelined were the first signals of a change in the housing market. The threat of a further rise in mortgage interest rates has now been added to this.

Quantitative data on collaborative housing are currently scattered or even only available upon request, and lack standard definitions. This prevents a comparative understanding of the challenges and opportunities that these housing forms offer. Furthermore, comparative data are needed to facilitate mutual learning and communication amongst users across countries and regions.

An undiminished large latent demand for owner-occupied houses, insufficient availability of new-builds and existing dwellings, and an increased financing capacity are the combined underlying cause of the enormous price rises on the owner-occupied housing market in the third quarter of 2021. Also the availability of houses for sale in the existing housing stock has never been as low as in this quarter. The other side of the picture is the declining number of house sales and households taking more and more risks when taking out mortgages.

Buildings in the EU are responsible for about 40% of the total energy consumption. Increasing the energy efficiency of housing is important for achieving the EU's energy efficiency goals and reducing CO2 emissions. Housing corporations and the construction industry need to work together better to achieve this goal. Jelle Koolwijk of MBE recently won the Research, Innovation, Sustainability and Enterprise (RISE) AWARD for his research into successful partnerships.

The supply of homes for sale in the existing housing stock has never been as low as in the second quarter of 2021. The supply of newly build owner-occupied houses has not picked up sufficiently in the last six quarters and in the first quarter of 2021 it even fell back. However, the latent demand for owner-occupied dwellings remains high. The result is an unprecedentedly tight owner-occupied housing market and again a sharp increase in house prices.

With her thesis on investments in rental housing for middle-income households Ana Luiza Barros has won the BZK thesis prize of the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK). Her thesis is about the possibilities of institutional investors, such as pension funds and insurance companies, to invest more in rental housing for the middle class in the Netherlands.