Why are there so many first-time homebuyers in Norway right now?
What's happening to first time buyers?
There were 12,758 first-time buyers in Norway in the first three months of 2025, according to the latest statistics from the Norwegian Association of Real Estate Agents (NEF), the highest number recorded in a quarter since 1998, when there were 13,603 first-time buyers.
The start of this year marked the fifth consecutive quarter in which the number of first-time buyers has grown.
It wasn't just Norway as a whole that saw the highest number of first-time buyers in 17 years, but Oslo, Stavanger and Trondheim. Tromsø, which had an unusually weak housing market in 2008, had a higher number of buyers in 2017. In Bergen, there was also a higher number in 2017.
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What first-time buyers need to know about the current state of the Norwegian property market?
What's behind the rise in the number of first-time buyers?
It is not as if the price of flats and houses has crashed, giving first-time buyers a chance to enter the market.
"The new upturn in 2024 came despite increased house prices," NEF noted in its report.
It put the rise in new entrants to the market instead down to "high wage growth, lower inflation and prospects for lower interest rates".
On January 1st, 2025,
Norway also loosened its equity mortgage requirements
from 15 percent to 10 percent, a change the report said had likely contributed to the high number of first-time buyers.
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Buyers are more willing to make sacrifices
First-time buyers appear to be rushing onto the market partly out of fear that prices are set to rise still higher, with some willing to make sacrifices to get their first foothold.
"The co-buyer index also shows that more first-time buyers purchase together with others during periods of high housing price growth," the report reads.
The average size of first-time buyers' homes has also shrunk steadily from 100 square metres in 2008 to only 88 square metres in 2024, a 12 percent decline.
In Oslo, the average size has fallen from 67 square metres in 2008
to only 61 square metres in 2024.
Figures that NEF has commissioned from Statistics Norway also show that an increasing proportion of young people have received help from their parents when buying a home, especially in Oslo.
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What's changed on the supply side?
There have been changes on the supply side as well, with NEF reporting an increase in the number of smaller properties coming onto the market as private and professional investors sell off rental properties.
This, it wrote in the report "has freed up the smaller properties that first-time buyers are demanding".
The report suggests that there may be a fear among buyers that the low rate of house building in recent years will mean that the number of properties available is likely to shrink.
"High housing price growth in the coming years, partly as a result of high population growth and low housing construction, may have contributed to a fear that the 'train will leave the station' if you do not enter the housing market quickly," the report concludes.
This was a sentiment Carl O. Geving, NEF's chief executive echoed in an interview with Dagens Næringsliv (
DN
) about the results.
"You can say there are good days now, but bad days will come when the housing supply runs out," he said.
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