Bedrooms for sale highlight the depths of Europe's housing crisis
The Straits Times
MADRID/LONDON, Feb 27 - A Spanish startup is selling bedrooms in flats shared with strangers, a British developer offers mortgages for friends willing to buy together, while stakes in rental properties help some tenants cover their housing costs. Read more at straitstimes.com.
MADRID/LONDON, Feb 27 - A Spanish startup is selling bedrooms in flats shared with strangers, a British developer offers mortgages for friends willing to buy together, while stakes in rental properties help some tenants cover their housing costs.
Such unconventional arrangements highlight the lengths some young Europeans are ready to go to cope with a housing crisis that has hit them the hardest.
Over the past decade, house prices in the European Union grew 10% faster than incomes, according to the European Commission research, and all metrics show that the young feel the squeeze the most.
And while plans announced by the EU executive in December to make housing more affordable have yet to take shape, some businesses offer novel ways of getting a foothold in the increasingly challenging property market.
In Spain, where housing shortages in Madrid, Barcelona and other major cities were made worse by a surge in short-term holiday rentals, Habitacion.com offers individual rooms for up to 80,000 euros ($95,200), about a third of what a one-bedroom flat would fetch in similar locations.
It said it sold 200 rooms last year and has a waiting list of 32,000, with properties in seven cities listed on its website.
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