Housing Lab

Many countries offer financial support to young buyers to make homeownership more easily accessible for the next generation. A high-profile policy in this respect was the 2021 Dutch “starter tax exemption” (startersvrijstelling OVB), which waived the standard 2% real-estate transfer tax for homebuyers under 35. The idea was simple: lower the barrier to entry for…

Which house price data can researchers use? Ideally, one would use sales prices: the prices at which houses were actually sold. In practice, however, this data isn’t always available, or it only becomes available with a delay. Therefore, list prices or assessed values ​​(such as the official tax assessments like WOZ values in the Netherlands)…

In a recent article, Marco Giacoletti, Matthijs Korevaar and Franklin Qian study a large-scale policy relaxing residential land supply constraints near major Dutch cities in the mid-1990s (the so-called ‘Vinex policy‘). Land allocation was determined centrally and was unrelated to pre-policy local market dynamics. Using administrative data, the effects on housing, mobility, and labour markets…

What is the societal and economic value of NV Zeedijk? This question was addressed by Thomas de Graaff, Casper Klipp en Hans Koster. NV Zeedijk was founded in the 1980s to revitalize the then-deteriorated Zeedijk area in Amsterdam. By strategically purchasing, renovating, and actively managing properties, the organization – with the Municipality of Amsterdam as…

The housing market Is not immune to climate change. When we think about climate change, we often focus on floods and heavy rainfall. But underground, a slower and less visible risk is emerging: land subsidence. Sinking gardens, cracked walls, broken pipes, and damaged foundations occur gradually, but they can suddenly lead to major financial consequences…