European building ranking
This eighth edition was written by the Building Section of the Department of Planning, Building and Heritage of Belgium's Walloon Region. In the report's top-ten ranking the countries with the oldest housing were Sweden and Denmark: 69% of the housing in Sweden and 66.8% of the housing in Denmark were built before 1970. Nearly half (42%) of Denmark's two and a half million dwellings were built before 1945. UK and French homes are also old: 41% of the more than 25 million British homes were built before 1945 and only 13% were built after 1971. The situation is similar in France, where 66% of homes were built before 1970. The country with the newest housing is Ireland (with a population of about 4 million), where 43% of homes have been built after the 1970s. Another two small countries have a lot of recent housing: Finland has a population 5 million 200 thousand and 56.5% of its homes have been built since the 1970s, with 32.7% being built since 1971; Portugal has 10 336 000 inhabitants and 31% of its homes have been built since 1971. 47% of people in Greece and the Netherlands live in houses built after 1971. Almost 29% of the homes in the Netherlands and Luxemburg were built after 1980.
The sizes of homes in Europe vary.
Luxemburg has the homes with the largest amount of floor space (125 square metres). The largest new homes are in Denmark: 137 square metres whereas the average size of a home is 108.9 square metres. New homes in Greece measure 126.4 square metres, 47 square metres more than an average-sized home. Dwellings are also getting bigger in Belgium (115 square metres for new buildings as opposed to an average home size of 86.3 square metres), the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Austria and Finland. Homes in Finland have got about 10 square metres larger but it is still the country with the smallest homes: 76.5 square metres on average. Homes are larger in Greece (79.6 square metres), Portugal (83 square metres) and the UK (85 square metres). Swedish homes are getting smaller: the average sized home measures 89 square metres whereas new homes measure 83 square metres on average. Dwellings are getting smaller in Portugal, too, where they measure just 82.2 square metres. In Italy too new homes are actually 10 square metres smaller than the average: 85.1 square metres as opposed to an average home size of 90. 3 square metres. The smallest new homes are found in the UK; they measure 76 square metres, 9 square metres smaller than the national average.
Detailed notes: "Detached houses", "Trends in New Housing", "Gross Investments in Housing" and the complete report that can be downloaded as a pdf file.
Certain small European countries have a higher proportion of detached houses. Ireland has the highest proportion: detached houses account for 92.4% of its total housing stock of one million three hundred thousand homes. Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg follow with 80%, 70.9% and 68.8% respectively. Italy is in last place as detached houses account for only 30% of its housing stock. In second to last place is Spain, where detached houses account for 37.7% of a total number of about 19 million dwellings. Then come Finland at 40.3% and Germany at 45.6%.
In Ireland, 61% of dwellings were built after 1971 and owing to its small population it also has the highest proportion of new homes to inhabitants: 13.7 new homes per thousand inhabitants. Germany has the greatest number of new homes in relation to total housing stock. Although only 11% of its housing stock was built after 1980 4 million 230 thousand new homes were built in 2000, although in 2001 (the last year for which figures are available), one million fewer homes were built in line with a downward trend that started in the 1980s. There has been steady growth in Spain, where 2 million 600 thousand new homes were built in 1980 and over 3 million were built in 2001. The number of new homes to number of inhabitants is also positive: 9.1 new houses per thousand inhabitants. After Spain, there is France, where 3 million new homes were built (figures for 2000), which consolidates the growth that started halfway through the 1980s. Luxemburg comes bottom with just 17 thousand new homes (3.1 per thousand inhabitants). It is preceded by Sweden with its 129 thousand new dwellings, which continues the downward trend that started in 1980. The situation is similar in Denmark, where 30 thousand new homes were built in 1980 whereas just 16 thousand were built in 2001.
Germany is the country that invests the highest proportion of its GNP in building. This proportion has been around 32% since the 1980s and has not changed today. Investments in other countries have, however, declined. The greatest decrease has been in Greece: 33% in 1980 and barely 21% in 2001. Also in Denmark investments in housing fell by 8 percentage points in 2001 to 21% of GNP. The market is also declining in Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. Italy lost only 3 percentage points between 1995 and 2001, still spending 23% of GNP in 2001 on housing. Investments in Ireland and Austria are actually on the increase: 23% in 1980 and 27% in 2001. There are also encouraging signs from Luxemburg, France, Italy, Sweden and the UK, where the market has increased by one percentage point in the last two or three years despite the contraction in the market in recent years.
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