I dropped my daughter at the market square where she met up with a friend of hers. I'm going to pick her up from the friend's place in the city after a few hours. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to shoot some pictures at the square. I noticed a bank had real estate listings on its window. I'm going to share some observations about the real estate market in Finland and Lahti in particular.
This guy is even more hardcore a wearer of shorts than I am. it was about 5 C now.
Like this guy, I'm wearing warmer clothes now.
A city bus driver on a lunch break.
The tower in the distance is the town hall designed by Eliel Saarinen who designed the main railway station in Helsinki.
That building was built in the 2010s by the look of it.
The main cathedral. An old wooden church was torn down where that eyesore of a security bunker against the devil was built. The old church was too small for the growing city. Lahti was only incorporated as a town/city in the 1906. Before that it was part of the municipality of Hollola that has existed since the 16th century.
The market hall. Closed on Sundays.
There are some people having their coffee on the terrace outside after all. Otherwise the market square was completely dead.
No customers here, either.
As you can see, the season has ended.
The population of the urban area of Lahti is about 132,000 including the center of the municipality of Nastola to the east, which is not technically part of the urban area because it is separated from Lahti by a very narrow undeveloped gap. The city is located about 100 km or an hour's drive from central Helsinki, which is the center of an urban area having a population of 1.4 million.
What Covid-19 did to the real estate market in Finland was turn net migration back towards smaller municipalities surrounding large urban centers and the outer suburbs. Since the financial crisis of 2008, exurbia as well as the outer suburbs had increasingly suffered from a lack of demand as the increasingly aging population opted for smaller homes in or adjacent to urban cores. The long-term trend of the depopulation of the deep rural areas is still in effect.
This is a typical suburban house built in the 2000's or the 2010's. The average monthly gross income of full-time employees in the country is about €2,800. This particular house is located about 10 km to the north of Lahti city center. The property is next to a primary school and it has four bedrooms, one full bathroom adjacent to a sauna and two half baths. The text does not say the year of construction but my guess is that the house was built between 2006 and 2012.
This one is a rowhouse in an older suburb by a lake. It was most likely built some time between the late 1980's and the late 1990's. The ownership of homes that are not properties is through a special type of corporation established for the governance of one or several separate buildings the homeowners are shareholders of. The particular shares owned by a particular shareholders entitle to the possession of a particular apartment. The governance is similar to the governance of any corporation. There is at least one annual shareholders' meeting where a board is elected. It is typical of these so-called housing corporations to hire a management company to manage all day-to-day affairs, to do the accounting and to manage renovation projects. It is the duty of the board members to oversee the management.
The latter number is the asking price including all the debt held by the housing corporation per share times the number of shares entitling to the possession of this particular home.
This is a studio apartment in the city center. It seems to have been built in the 1960's. The text says all the large renovations necessary for a building of this age have been made.