Comment by sweaty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sweaty | Hacker News Reader

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I'm 25, and I live in The Netherlands as well. My parents managed to buy a house for 110k with government subsidies back in the 90s, they didn't need a deposit, they didn't even need any money. All they had to do was earn just above minimum wage, and they could include any costs from the buying process into the mortgage. Their house sold for 475k last year, a 90s starter home for low incomes. My grandparents had it even better, their house cost 40k in the 60s, of which 40% was paid for directly by the government through subsidies.

I'm in the top 1.4% of income in the country, yet I cannot buy a house, because I don't have the savings required to overbid by 100k. There's a lot of things causing this overbidding, my parents for example sold their house because they wanted something smaller, but because they now had 475k in the bank, they were able to overbid by 80k on a house listed at 250k which ruins any chances for younger people to buy them. There's no way I can match this, let alone less fortunate people of my generation. I'm currently renting for 1600 a month, my landlord rented the place out to pay for his new house's mortgage. They're unwilling to sell it to me, because they plan to retire here in the next 10 years. The house is worth 300k in the current market, it's a very small starter home, but I literally had no other option because there's absolutely nothing available. And this is in a small town in the east of the country, my commute is over an hour as I work in the west.

There's nothing your generation can do, apart from just owning one home. It's not your fault, it's horrible policy making (such as getting rid of the VROM ministry) among other things.

Yeah I'm happy I have a nice home but we also have some annoyances (minor compared to yours), we have been ready to move on to a bigger property for about 5 years now, very little comes up though. And when it does, we are often too late (they cap at 80 viewers for example, this is talking about 500k+ properties, I swear, 10 years ago you got a couple of viewers for each property, the realtor told me back then he negotiates with 1 person/couple at a time (unimaginable now!) and I think the number of properties for sale in my city easily dropped by 60% over the last 10 years).

Recently we finally got to view a nice property with some land (more rural, 545k) and someone overbid by 105k without and further reservations on the contract. So we are also pretty stuck.

Still it baffled me that when I talked to my bank I can probably sell my 2012 bought house (195k, modernized for 50k) for 330k! And then, I can repurpose my old mortgage to make it repayment-free ("overgangsregeling"), bla bla bla, and I can move to a 600k property with an increase of only 250 euro net per month. It's crazy!!! Yeah your generation doesn't pay transfer-tax but that's a drop in the bucket. Add to that that increasing a bid by 20k only costs you about 60 euro net per month (low rent, 30 years mortgage) and you get into a crazy bidding race really easily.

I feel like we need to build many more affordable houses ("starterswoningen", 200-300k). But I guess that 400-700k properties are where the money is at.

I'm now thinking about buying land and putting a prefab or standard house on it. Still, land is also not easy to find.

Edit: Oh a nice fact about my house: The woman living in it before us bought it for 19500 Guilders (~9k euro's) in the sixties...

We definitely need to build more houses, if you look at Topotijdreis and start from around the 50s-60s, increment by 10 years until now, you'll see that we haven't built anything to house my generation. The homes that were built, are large single family homes, not starter homes. The starter homes that we're meant to move into, are still occupied by the generation that grew old in them (born 30s-40s). Those 60s neighborhoods though are now slowly disappearing and replaced with more large single family homes bought by my parent's generation, with their starter homes being rented out to afford their mortgage. The system is completely broken and most of my parent's generation have been told not to pay off their mortgage, I'm curious what will happen when interest rates rise to 5%+ (or even 10%+ like in the 80s), so many of them will be forced to sell because so many are upside down in interest-only mortgages still.

Fortunately, people of my generation tend to earn better than their parents, so maybe in 10-20 years we'll see a situation it's completely turned around? Parents living with their children?

There's definitely enough houses if we take ageing into account (when people born in the 30s and 40s are starting to die off) but since COVID isn't the grim reaper my generation was silently hoping for, there's nowhere for us to go apart from staying with our parents or renting for insane prices.

dead-middle millennial here. Many of my friends been buying house circa 2016-2018 back when you can still get a 5-10k euro discount, even in Randstad/Eindhoven area. Not anymore. I was just start looking to buy a house and I was just giving up after 4 months and several attempts at bidding with crazy competitors.

I think most people were simply owning 1 house and doesn't benefit much from this housing crisis. Like you said, people who want to go out can't get in to a new house either. We're at the lowest point in NL history with fewest vacant properties available. So taxing all the property owner wouldn't do justice. However, I hope the government start to impose a progressive tax on entities owning multiple properties (hello Chinese/Prince/BlackRock investors?). They're the ones who benefitted the most from this situation. Though realistically, seeing how the current government track records, I kinda feel helpless that they'll help the younger generation. I even feel bad for Gen Z whose racking up student debt on top of it.

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