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A resident is facing a major renovation of his rental property. What does the renovation entail? What choices can a tenant make himself? What kind of preparations should he make, and what will the final result look like? Virtual reality enables residents to walk through all of the stages in half an hour, from demolition to the final result.

As a result of skyrocketing inflation, the European Central Bank (ECB) has raised refinancing rates several times, which has also caused mortgage rates in the Netherlands to triple in the past three quarters. These sharply rising mortgage rates directly affect households' borrowing capacity. In addition, it puts indirectly pressure on consumer confidence in the general economy and in the owner-occupied housing market. A drop in the purchase price like in the third quarter of 2022 is logical in such a situation, even if the number of homes sold still remains fairly constant.

Bringing about change in construction is difficult. In circular construction projects, for instance, ambitions are often not achieved because cooperation has to take place differently than what we are used to. Although circular techniques are often available, their deployment for transition to a circular construction economy does not happen automatically. Professor of Construction Cultures Alfons van Marrewijk makes the necessary connection between engineering and social sciences so that change does take place.

“Construction law can be seen as part of a galaxy: different parties, legal frameworks and interests all influence each other,” describes professor Evelien Bruggeman. “Balancing those forcefields is paramount to give technological developments a place in society.” On 16 September, the professor of Building Law at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment will give her inaugural speech, showing how digitisation in the built environment can find a place in the galaxy of construction law and the force field of technological and societal innovation.

The number of offered and sold new-build homes in the first quarter of 2022 appears to have fallen back to the level as it was shortly after the credit crisis (2008-2013). In addition, the number of new build homes for which a building permit was granted in the first five months of 2022 was about 15% lower than in the previous year. In the owner-occupied sector, this is even more than 20%.

City centres have become increasingly busier, and the pressure on the sometimes several centuries-old infrastructure is growing, for example due to freight traffic. Many municipalities in the Netherlands face major maintenance challenges, with costs running into billions of euros. Furthermore, the changes in the short term come on top of major transitions in the area of climate adaptation, circularity, energy and transport.

The number of mortgage applications reached a new record in the first quarter of 2022 due to an enormous increase in the number of refinancings of existing mortgages. Consumers are thus anticipating the first increases in mortgage interest rates. However, this rise in interest rates in the first three months of 2022 has also had an impact on the maximum borrowing capacity of households.

Many of the outdated typical Dutch tenement flats are large consumers of energy and therefore often end up on the demolition list. However, these typical flats do not have to disappear from the city scene. Symbiotic Urban Movement (SUM) - a team of students from Delft University of Technology - has developed a plan to sustainably transform all 847,000 tenement flats in the Netherlands and create more housing.

Master's student Joep Bastiaans made an inventory of recently developed collaborative housing concepts for seniors and investigated to what extent these meet their needs and wishes. His Master's thesis 'Professional collaborative housing concepts for seniors' won the Jeroen van der Veer Thesis Award 2021.

Insufficient supply of new and existing owner-occupied homes is the main reason for the once again enormous rise in house prices in the fourth quarter of 2021. A declining number of house sales and increasing numbers of first-time buyers and middle-income households being sidelined were the first signals of a change in the housing market. The threat of a further rise in mortgage interest rates has now been added to this.