Fewer holiday homes on offer

Most people are expected to stay home this summer. At least: until recently, half of all interviewees were not planning to go on holiday because of corona, according to a large-scale survey. And a third of those who do want to go, stay at home. Now people don’t always do what they say and the circumstances surrounding corona change quite a bit. So who knows, maybe the number of border crossings will increase at a late stage. But it seems pretty sure to me that the coming summer holidays will see more Dutch people walking and cycling around in their own country than in other years.

What this will mean for the housing market is to wait and see, but it could well lead to more activity than a ‘normal’ summer holiday. This could also have consequences for the market for recreational homes. The ‘stay-at-home’ are bound to discover beautiful holiday parks and attractive bungalows. But here, too, the choice decreases. In the market for recreational homes, the Netherlands is growing towards a tight situation such as that which has existed in the regular housing market for much longer. The available supply has fallen by more than a quarter in a year, according to research by the NVM.

At the beginning of this year, there were only 1,900 recreational homes for sale in the Netherlands. The average selling price in 2019 was €152,000, representing a moderate increase of 2.6%. There is a clear dichotomy in the market: high demand for cheap holiday homes (up to approximately €100,000) and for homes in the higher segment (above €200,000 with even peaks above the million). There was clearly less to do in the middle segment. The regional differences are also large: the number of transactions in the popular coastal areas (Zeeland, North Holland) is declining due to the limited supply. In Drenthe, on the other hand, the number of sales has risen: prices are lower and apparently the ‘refurbishers’ are popular here.

Corona does not yet seem to have an effect on the number of sales of recreational homes either, but the supply is decreasing. We will see in a while whether taking a holiday at home will eventually have an impact. In any case, we would like a nice holiday period.