Sweden's housing market was predicted to cool down for 2016, but experts have been giving contrasting views about this. Based from the figures released recently, Swedish home sellers rarely asked below-asking-price for the properties compared to the last five years.
The country has been practicing the kind of below-asking-price for the house which the sellers are offering to buyers for a number of years. However, this has been rare in the last three years where it dropped to 50 per cent according to the figures released this week.
Booli, the online largest property marketplaces in Sweden, revealed that around 17.3 percent of the properties went for less than sellers hoped compared to the 8.7 percent last year.
"It was an exceptional year for housing where prices increased dramatically in many parts of the country during the year," Josephine Linghamma, marketing manager for Booli.se, said.
She added, "The share of reduced-price apartments [falling] and shorter advertising times are a natural consequence of this."
The latest records on home properties advertising stated that even the length of time with which these properties are advertised reduced to just 17 days in total, which actually dropped 16 days of the total time in Gothenburg. Thus, the national average for advertising times is just 25 days.
Per-Arne Sandegren, head of analysis for Märklarstatistik, the Swedish agency for real estate agent sales measurement, said, "The best thermometer will be in late January and February when it usually picks up ... it is very still cheap to borrow money and there is a sabotage of housing and a big demand still."
Sandegren previously explained that even during Christmas last year, the housing market was very low. But for him, this is normal.
"I would say that this part of the year, in the beginning of Christmas season it's quite normal that the market slows down a bit," he mentioned.
With his statements, does this means Sweden's housing pricing crisis is just the outcomes of the last Christmas season or it would be like this all throughout the year? If this would continue, there will be a lot of consequences to observe from the country.
First observation will be the changes on sellers' manner of selling and the buyers' choosing attitude on properties. Second will be the shortened advertising times of the home properties which obviously affects the agencies in this business.