The Copenhagen Report

by Tim Anderson (timothyanderson2005@gmail.com)

Following up on my last article about Copenhagen's housing market (The sound of the popping bubble: A bit about psychology and Copenhagen's housing market) that talked about how the housing price bubble in Copenhagen that has now burst, here's some additional rather useful information, particularly if you are a prospective buyer of an apartment or house in or around Copenhagen.

There are a couple of excellent websites that, particularly when taken together, give and excellent overview of the market in Copenhagen (and around Denmark).

The first is a site, www.boliga.dk, which lists all the houses and apartments for sale in Copenhagen, including the cost of these properities per m2 - and provides links to the agents who are selling each of them. This site has been stirring up some controversy thanks to the Danish Real Estate Agents Association, who objected the manner in which the site obtained the information the housing market statistics it calculates (well, used to - it has now stopped, thanks to these objections).

These statistics included a calculation of how much the entire market rose or dropped over the past day. Needless to say, they showed that the housing market has been in quite a freefall recently.

But about the trends. I also noted previously, that a real estate agent in Copenhagen who I had spoken to had noted that asking prices were around 25% higher than selling prices in Copenhagen, at present.

Now, as one would expect, one would expect the next step would be to see asking prices begin to fall - and probably quite drastically - as increasingly desparate sellers begin to take steps to attract the relatively few buyers that are out there.

And guess what? That is exactly what is happening.

Which brings us to the second useful website, www.tipenbolig.dk, a site that provides a daily list of all properties in Copenhagen (and across Denmark) with changed asking price - and the amount of this change. Obviously, this gives a pretty clear picture of the market trend - particularly since about 99% of the price changes registered each day for the past several weeks have been reductions in asking prices (and there have been a lot of them).

In fact, in total the asking prices of properties across Copenhagen have fallen by 1.2bn (!!) kroner since November 2006. That's quite something. You might want to hold off buying a new place in Copenhagen for a little while longer...