20% owners worry about home´s value decease: survey

Nearly four home owners out of ten in Finland do not find the monetary value of their home important, according to a survey commissioned by OP Financial Group.

A fifth of respondents, however, are afraid that the value of their home will decrease, said OP in a press release on Thursday referring to the survey.

The respondents of the OP survey commissioned from Taloustutkimus were asked to choose a statement that best described how meaningful their home’s financial value was to them.

The statement “The home’s monetary value is not meaningful to me” was chosen by 38% of home owner-occupants.

“This can be considered a fairly surprising result, as when talking about the housing market, many focus on the apartment’s monetary value and value development. Based on the survey, your own home’s monetary value is not something people in Finland are constantly thinking about in every day,” said Satu Nurmi, Senior Vice-President, Mortgages and Real Estate Business of OP Financial Group.

During the last year, the value of homes has dropped everywhere in Finland, and OP Financial Group’s economists predict that prices will not start rising until the next year.

Every fifth home owner, however, believes the value of their home will increase

Even though some home- owners are not interested in the value development of their current home, 62% pay attention to it in one way or another.

About 7% of home owners monitor price development in their residential area so that they know when it is the right time to sell their apartment. About 11% of the respondents said they would try to increase the value of their home through renovation.

About 20% of home owners believe the value of their home will increase, and an equal number (20%) are worried that the value of their apartment will decrease.

“I’m sure that owner-occupants have been following the public discussion on how the housing market is developing differently in different parts of Finland,” Nurmi said.

As many as 49% of home owners living outside the cities replied that the monetary value of their home was unimportant to them.

“The residents of these areas might have had different aspects than investment in mind when buying an apartment. Instead, they specifically bought an apartment as a home for themselves. In areas where the value of your home is likely to fall in the future, you should try to gain wealth in other manners such as by saving and investing,” Nurmi said.

About 1,600 people in Finland took the survey in December, of which 1,000 lived in owner-occupied homes.

The margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points for the entire respondent group.