After years of soaring real estate prices in Norway, especially in Oslo and Stavanger, it finally was a little less expensive to buy a home last month. Brokers reported a slight decline in average sales prices, down 0.3 percent from April to May.
Prices were still around 7.5 percent higher in May than they were in May of last year, though. The average price per square meter for condominiums (leiligheter) rose 8.9 percent to NOK 46,572 (USD 6,209) on a nationwide basis, with single-family home prices up 6.3 percent to NOK 22,319.
In Norway’s larger cities, the prices can be double that and Oslo registered another small increase. In Stavanger, where prices were regularly climbing for years in line with Norway’s oil-fed economy, the sudden slowdown in the oil industry has kept housing prices almost still for the past year.
“I think the Stavanger region will enter a period when prices decline,” Christian Vammervold Dreyer of the real estate industry’s trade association, Eiendom Norge, told news bureau NTB. The number of resales nationwide fell 4.8 percent, to 8,791.
newsinenglish.no staff
