8 - Private renting in Denmark: foreign investors in the crosshairs

Summary

Introduction

Internationally, Denmark is admired by housing experts for its pioneering approach to co-housing, for the tenant democracy of its social housing estates, and for the clean lines of its modern residential architecture. Its private rented sector (PRS) is discussed mainly, if at all, in terms of the complexity of the rent-control system. Arguably, though, the PRS is now the most interesting of Danish housing tenures, as in recent years the sector has become a political battleground. Politicians have adopted measures to try to deter certain overseas investors whose activities, they say, have pushed up private rents in cities. Similar debates are taking place in other countries and the Danish experience may offer some lessons, though similar forces can have very different effects in different places. As always with housing, context is all.

The basics: tenures, dwellings, landlords and tenants

Tenure split and dwelling types

Denmark’s PRS declined steadily in size over the last half of the 20th century. The proportion of privately rented dwellings more than halved in 50 years, from 39.8 per cent in 1960 to 14 per cent in 2010 (Table 8.1). As late as 2014, a leading authority wrote that: ‘Like most other countries in Europe, the Danish PRS has been in decline for many years (and) … it must be expected that the sector will be further diminished in the years to come’ (Skifter Andersen, 2014: 99, 124). In the last ten years, however, this decline has reversed and the PRS began to grow in country as a whole and in the capital. In Copenhagen the sector now accounts for 23 per cent of occupied dwellings, up from 19 per cent in 2010.

Dwellings

Most Danish PRS housing is purpose-built and tenure-specific and tends to be older than the dwelling stock as a whole. About a third of PRS homes were built before 1920 (Figure 8.1) compared with one in six of all homes.

Under Danish law, different regulations apply to various physical types of buildings, so it is meaningful to subdivide the PRS into dwelling types. Danish experts consider the true PRS to consist of dwellings in rental-only buildings with three or more units; that is, multi-family blocks. These make up about two-thirds of the overall PRS stock and more than threequarters of the homes owned by company landlords (Table 8.2).