This post shows how the residential real estate market in Finland changed in terms of volume in years 2018-2022.
Volume
Data
I work with a dataset of sell ads that I scraped from Google search cache between October 2017 and January 2022. It’s by far not complete, but it’s representative enough.
The displayed volume is amount of apartments, row houses, pair houses and family houses for sale. It includes all the forms of ownership. It doesn’t include plots, garages and holiday homes. It includes both new and “second-hand” real estate.
I am now thinking that I should explore new and resold separately. It would capture the difference in behavior of developers and regular people.
The whole Finland
The first plot shows the total number of all the advertised real estate for sale in Finland. We can see the peak was in summer 2018 with about 67000 items for sale. The lowest point is in the end of observation period (January 2022) with only about 38000 items for sale, that’s about 43% drop.
We can also see a yearly repeating trend. There is most real estate for sale during summer (July) and least after the beginning of the year. I guess this is somehow connected with finishing building projects. New real estate accounts for a very large portion of advertised real estate (at least in the last 8 years in Finland).
We can see that the covid pandemic (April 2020 further) didn’t really make much of a difference. Years 2019 and 2020 are very alike, just with an offset of about 20000.
I then display the volume for the biggest 11 municipalities in Finland. The city volume is blue, and the whole-Finland volume is in light green on different scale, to compare the trend.
Most of the cities follow the total trend, with the exceptions of
- Vantaa, where the volume of sold real estate droppedby 54% in 2 years - from ~3300 (summer 2018) to ~1500 (summer 2020). It seems that nothing was build there in 2019 and 2020.
- Jyväskylä, where there was quite a boom last year (2021), bringing the volume of residential real estate for sale almost at the level of 2018, which was the volume peak for the whole Finland
The cities are
Helsinki
Espoo
Tampere
Vantaa
Oulu
Turku
Jyväskylä
Kuopio
Lahti
Joensuu
Pori
Volume per resident
In order to compare the seld real estate volume between various cities, it’s useful to relate the volume to number of residents in the municipality. I chose to display how many residents there are per one sold real estate unit. The more residents per one item, the more the “scarce” the real estate is.
Helsinki and Turku
I observed that the number of residents per sold unit was really high in Helsinki and Turku. Both are relatively small (245.63 km2 resp 214.19 km2), densely populated municipalites with lots of rental housing. Both are offset by neighboring municipalities, Vantaa and Espoo for Helsinki and Rasio and Kaarina for Turku. The count goes as high as 200 rsidents per one real estate ad.
Other populous municipalities
The other municipalities show similar pattern, except for Vantaa, where real estate for sale was scarce already in 2020. It seems that people started to buy a lot of Vantaa proeprty when the Covid hit (April 2020). The most real estate to buy per capita has almost always been in Kupio with as little ~50 residents per one real estate ad.