The shortage of Housing in the Netherlands is a known fact. And there are no simple solutions to this complicated issue. Many people think that the easiest solution to solve this shortage is to build more houses (fast). However, this proves to be an impossible task, most of all because of the increasing scarcity of suitable building lots.
The NVM publishes quarterly figures about the housing market. The reports covering the past periods show a continuous decrease in the number of new-build houses. The figures for new-build housing are still lagging whereas the number of listed (existing) houses increased. To illustrate this: only 5000 houses were sold during the second quarter of 2022, which is a drop of 48% compared to the same period last year. The number of available houses also decreased by 17% while the average selling price for new-build houses increased by 12%. This clearly shows that, at some point, we may well be running out of new-build houses. The number of sold new-build houses has never been this low since the credit crunch of 2011. That doesn’t mean that there is no demand for new-build houses. The shortage remains unsolved, however, because both the project developers and the buyers remain reticent, and the main causes for this are the sharply increased mortgage interest and the high construction costs.