EIKA conducted a survey of its news subscribers on April 21-23, aiming to find out the expectations of potential housing customers during the quarantine and post-quarantine period. As many as 504 news subscribers participated in the survey. Respondents were asked about their plans to purchase housing in the near future, reasons for postponing the decision, and expectations of what would encourage them to purchase housing after the quarantine ends.
When asked whether they planned to purchase a home in the current half of the year, as many as 65 percent of respondents answered that they had such plans, and the majority of these respondents (54 percent) do not abandon their plans and continue to consider purchasing a home. According to Martynas Žibūda, EIKA Development Manager, the first thing that surprised us was the large number of survey responses, which reveals not only the undiminished interest in the real estate market, but also indicates the market’s remaining potential.
When analyzing the results of the question of what caused people to refuse to purchase housing in the near future, we see that intentions were largely changed by circumstances unrelated to potential buyers – uncertainty caused by quarantine (27%), expectations that prices would fall (27%), changed financing conditions (19%), decreased income (15%), and reassessed needs (12%).
When asked what would encourage people to purchase housing during or immediately after the quarantine, respondents most notably singled out discounts and attractive offers from housing sellers (41%), but market participants also expect favorable financing conditions from banks (21%), reliability from developers (12%), certainty about the stability of real estate prices (11%), and a return to pre-quarantine levels of income (10%). “It is probably nothing unusual that potential buyers expect discounts and offers; even in times of economic upturn, the client negotiates in every transaction, but the market’s return is largely determined by the general economic situation, which influences buyers’ future expectations,” M. Žibūda comments on the survey results.
The analysis of the collected data shows the current state of the market, which is dominated by uncertainty and insecurity. “The market’s standstill and its return to normal will largely be determined by how quickly the aforementioned uncertainty disappears. This could be contributed to by both the government with its proposed compensation and economic stimulus measures, banks that assess the financial situation of the population in a long-term, not short-term, perspective, and developers who will provide not only favorable conditions for purchasing housing, but perhaps also guarantees of the client’s credit solvency. EIKA intends to provide similar offers to its clients in the near future,” says the head of development at EIKA.