“Fuskbygget” (2024): a book on Swedish housing market
If you've resided in Sweden for a while, you might've noticed that the housing market has its special traits. Between the difficulties getting an apartment to rent that's not bloody expensive and is available for longer than a year, the uncharacteristically hectic nature of bidding on housing, and the mortgages that don't need to be fully paid off, there's probably at least something that doesn't work the same way in Sweden as it does in your previous country. Fuskbygget is a book that explains where at least some of that is coming from.
If you're considering to buy a house or an apartment in Sweden, it's helpful to understand the trends in prices and laws involved.
The author is Andreas Cervenka, a journalist currently with Aftonbladet and previously with Dagens Industri as well as Svenska Dagbladet. He's been writing about economy and technology for a while, and this is his fourth book.
Lena
The book doesn't start with houses right away though. First it quotes Ungdomsbarometern's report saying that in 2024, 66% of Swedes aged 15–24 thought the society was going in the wrong direction, compared with 37% five years prior. To the question “what's the most important to you now”, 53% respond “to earn money”, which is also an increase, from 36%. The price of a home as measured in average yearly income has risen in lots of countries during the last 30 years, but Sweden stands out in just by how much. It's hard for the younger generation to get into the housing market at all.
Moving on to the people who did manage to get a loan, Cervenka goes into the interest rate sensitivity. Towards the end of 2021, the inflation jumped up, the prices were increasing by 12% per year instead of the more usual 1.4%; eventually, Riksbanken made the interest rate higher, which affected the mortgages and was universally described as an economical shock for the Swedish families. The new interest rate was around 4%; not that big at all, historically speaking, but Swedes got used to over-consuming credit over the last few decades, so it was indeed a shock.
Why are Swedes over-consuming loans though? Well, there are many chapters dedicated to that. Everyone's gotta live somewhere, and the housing prices keep going up ever faster. There's the absent property tax which could've acted as a partial brake on prices (it was replaced by a fee capped at 9.5k SEK per year back in 2008), the pandemic, the financial incentives of the realtors (who were involved in 77% of the sales in 2001 and in 91% in 2023), the low requirements on banks' capital when it comes to mortgages, the fact that the debt follows the person and not the house in Sweden (if you can't pay interest to your bank, Kronofogden will come for you and then bank will get its money one way or another), the laws that allow to not amortize your house loan but just pay interest forever, and a bunch of other interesting stuff. The author also addresses the questions of “why don't they just build more?” (one of the hints: Hemnet's profit margin is 40% but a company that builds something needs to deal with ever-more-higher prices of land) and “what do the other countries do?”. The answers are complex; there's no self-assured prognosis for what happens next, but I think the book is illuminating anyway.
Language
While there are some terms from economics, finance, and politics involved, they're not that many, and the language overall is more relaxed than the book's serious topic might suggest. I'd say the book is pretty much within reach for someone on B2 level of Swedish, and a breezy short read for someone on C1.