Dutch Home Prices Jump Again

(Bloomberg) -- Dutch home prices jumped in the third quarter as a shortage of properties enabled the market to shrug off an economic contraction.

The median-weighted transaction price climbed 11.6% on an annual basis to 354,000 euros ($416,000), realtors association NVM reported on Thursday. In Amsterdam, the country’s biggest city, there was an 8% increase.

“Consumers hardly have anything to choose from any more,” NVM Chairman Onno Hoes said in a statement. “The housing market really needs more supply to keep housing affordable for a large number of people.”

The property market is one of the few areas of the economy that’s holding up as the pandemic takes its toll on numerous industries. While ABN Amro Bank NV and Rabobank Group don’t expect real estate prices to rise further next year, they have become more optimistic about the market’s prospects in recent months.

The Dutch central bank also underestimated the price pressure on the market, President Klaas Knot said on Tuesday. “You could say that the scarcity effect -- the shortage of housing -- is even stronger than what we thought we should include in our estimates last spring”, he said. “So if we had to make new estimates right now, we would be a little less pessimistic, given what we’ve seen in the last six months.”

In its last forecast, the central bank predicted a 2.1% drop in prices next year.

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