A red painted wooden house in the country with white door and window frames, in front of it a birch tree and a meadow, in the house bright and comfortably furnished rooms, with lots of space, tasteful furniture and textiles: This is how you imagine living in Sweden.

It's a cliché what else. Cultural historians know where it comes from.

An enterprising publisher from Düsseldorf brought a collection of pictures by the Swedish painter Carl Larsson onto the German market in 1909 under the title “Das Haus in der Sonne”, which was suitable for the masses;

Sebastian Balzter

Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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The Germans were enthusiastic, Scandinavia was already in fashion during the imperial era, and the book became a bestseller. The furniture company Ikea very consciously repeated its success many decades later with very similar motifs in its catalogs, not just in Germany, but all over the world.

The reality is different for the majority of the almost 10.5 million Swedes.

They do not live idyllically in the single-family house that they own.

According to the latest survey by the statistics authority, only just under 40 percent do this, a little less than in Germany.

And in Sweden the trend is currently clearly pointing downwards.

Young families in particular, who often want a few more rooms and a garden for obvious reasons, live much less often in their own four walls than they did around ten years ago.

According to a study by the Swedish Association of Real Estate Agents, the proportion has fallen by 16 percent since 2008.

Measure against high debt

However, the ownership rate has not only decreased in the low-income group, but in almost all classes. It has remained stable only in the fifth with the highest incomes. The conclusion of the broker: The Swedish dream of owning a home has shattered.

What happened? In Sweden, too, real estate prices have risen sharply in recent years. For single-family homes, the statistics show an average increase of 57 percent within a decade. This means that Sweden is the undisputed leader in Northern Europe; In the capital Stockholm a house today costs the equivalent of 830,000 euros on average. There are also stricter rules for real estate financing. First, in response to the financial crisis in 2008, the financial supervisory authority in Stockholm stipulated that a maximum of 85 percent of a property purchase could be paid for with loans in the future. In addition, a little later came the introduction of an annual minimum repayment rate of 2 percent if the mortgage exceeds 70 percent of the market value of the property. If the loan amount is also higher than the 4,5 times the gross annual household income, at least 3 percent must be repaid.

You have to know that private households in Sweden are on average twice as indebted as in Germany, mainly because of their high mortgages.

So it was politically appropriate to do something about the risk of over-indebtedness.

However, this has led to new difficulties on the Swedish real estate market.

Because the classic alternative to owning a home, renting an apartment, plays a different role in Sweden than it does in Germany.

Only 28 percent of Swedes rent a house, compared to 58 percent in Germany.

22 moves in 44 years of life

The construction of new rental apartments in Sweden fell sharply when the market underwent fundamental changes in the late 1960s. In Sweden leases are not an individual matter. Rather, the large, mostly municipal housing associations negotiate each year with the tenants' national interest group about the amount of rents. It is not about the market value to be determined on the basis of supply and demand, but about the so-called utility value of the apartments, which is determined by criteria such as the equipment, the layout and the traffic situation. In the big cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, rents on paper are therefore usually well below the market value. It is precisely there that only a few rental apartments have been built for decades,the expected return was too disappointing for investors.