Real estate/property sales in all of Austria slumped this year
From January to June 2023, a far fewer properties were traded than in the first half of 2022
In the first half of 2023, 58,195 real estate sales were registered in the land register in Austria, which was 21.6 percent less than in the same period of the previous year. Compared with the previous record half-year of 2021, when 76,589 transactions were recorded, the decline was even around a quarter.
Strongest decline in Lower Austria
Accordingly, all the federal states are in the red. In nominal terms, the biggest declines were in Lower Austria (minus 3,370 bookings) and Vienna (3,072). In percentage terms, the declines were highest in Salzburg (34.2 percent) and Vorarlberg (30.6 percent).
The federal capital Vienna has been hit particularly hard in terms of real estate sales turnover, here the transaction volume fell by 35.9 percent. So, Vienna alone was responsible for almost half (46.5 percent) of the nationwide decline in the volume of sales transactions!.
In Vorarlberg, the decline amounted to 27.9%, while Tyrol, Lower and Upper Austria and Carinthia each saw a drop of around 20%. In Burgenland, on the other hand, sales were only 3.5 percent short of the figure for the first half of 2022.
The total value of real estate registered in the first half of 2023 reached only 16.58 billion euros after the record amount in the previous year (21.73 billion), which is a decrease of 23.7 percent. Nevertheless, this year’s half-year trading value was the third best overall after 2022 and 2021.
Fewer terraced houses and semi-detached houses
In terms of property types, the number of terraced houses, semi-detached houses and penthouses traded fell by around one-third in each case. For apartments, the decline was a quarter, and for single-family houses and building plots, about a sixth.
Young couples and young families would suffer greatly from the tightened lending guidelines, commented Remax Austria CEO Bernhard Reikersdorfer on the new figures. “Especially the semi-detached and terraced houses, which are popular with families, are massively affected.”
But this development also means negative consequences in the billions for the building trade and the prefabricated house industry, “not to mention the ancillary building trades. ” (red, 6.9.2023)
Source: Der Standard – Translated from the German
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