Swedish News:

Three of four want a job change. Falling housing prices.  

• Three of four want a job change
  Three of four Swedes want another job, but only 10 percent actively look for one, according to a new study. “People don’t get around to doing it, they worry about it. Especially young people think it’s a little scary,” says Johanna Wilkens, press officer at Blocket Jobb (the Swedish equivalence of Craigslist). And Roland Paulsen, sociologist at Uppsala University says, “The nightmare is that you get a job you really hate. There’s both a sort of resignation as well as realism to it. Today’s job market is terribly uncertain, so there are rational reasons to stay where you are even if you don’t like it.” The study was prepared by Blocket Jobb in collaboration with YouGov.

• Falling housing prices
  Housing prices (co-op apartments as well as villas) are falling: The average price of a villa has gone down 3 percent the past three months, and the average price of a co-op has gone down 1 percent during the same time period. In October the prices of co-ops in the bigger city regions fell as much as 1 to 6 percent. “It’s a marked decline in the October numbers,” says Claudia Wörmann, analyst at Mäklarsamfundet. “We have an unusually unclear global financial situation. First Greece and then Italy. This uncertainty has led to a wait-and-see housing market. Money-wise it’s not so bad for the person buying a home, we still have a low interest rate, many are employed and for us who are there’s room for consumption, so it’s difficult to put the puzzle pieces together.” Though it’s been a while since there were this many minuses in the statistics, Wörmann isn’t too worried. “There are some positive sides to it as well," she says. "Prices haven’t fallen that much, we are not talking about two-digit numbers and oftentimes buyers and sellers are on the same market. So if you’re disappointed in what you get when you sell, at least when you buy it’s cheaper.”