Price data on housing transactions disappeared from public view
This article has been translated from Finnish with the help of automated translation. The Finnish original is the authoritative version.
In June 2026 the price data on individual housing transactions disappeared from public websites, and the National Land Survey is now proposing a state-maintained register in its place. The same gap recurs in the repair backlog of housing companies and in how banks interpret condition survey reports. Information on the state of the market is becoming obscured just when a turn in prices may be close.
Illustration, produced with artificial intelligence
In June 2026 one of the quiet basic services of the Finnish housing market disappeared almost unnoticed. The Housing Price Data site maintained by the Ministry of the Environment stopped showing the realised prices of individual transactions, which had previously been searchable by postal code for the past 12 months. The reason was technical: the agreement with the Central Federation of Finnish Real Estate Agencies (KVKL), which had supplied the data, came to an end. The consequence, however, is a matter of principle.
In finance the phenomenon has its own term: price discovery. It refers to the way realised transactions in a market form a reliable, continuously updating picture of an asset's true price level. On a stock exchange price discovery is almost automatic: every trade is recorded in a public trading system within seconds. In the housing market it has always been slower and more fragmented, but until June it was at least to some extent public in Finland. Now that gap has opened too.
The National Land Survey has noticed the same thing. Its director Janne Murtoniemi has proposed that a state-maintained register of realised transaction prices should be established covering the whole of Finland. The proposal would require a right, written into law, to collect and publish the data, and that has not yet been enacted. Whether the legislative changes this requires will proceed is an open question at this stage, and it is not worth claiming either way without knowing.
Why should this matter right now? The timing is exceptional. At the same time as price discovery is becoming obscured, several signs suggest that the Helsinki housing market may be close to a turning point. Prices have fallen to a level not seen in 20 years. Precisely when a market is looking for its floor, buyers and sellers would need fresh information most of all about where prices have actually settled. Instead they get less than they did a year ago.
Does a buyer not manage anyway, given that agents and banks have their own data? Partly, yes. Experts have advised looking for price information elsewhere: from estate agencies' own services, from Statistics Finland, from local estate agents. Fragmented information is not, however, the same thing as a single observation open to everyone. Each piece is partial, and assembling the overall picture is left to the buyer at exactly the moment when the cost of a misjudgement is at its highest.
The same gap recurs at another level of the market, although it is no longer about price but about the condition of the building. According to a survey, one in eight owners of a housing company share estimates that their housing company has a repair backlog, but only one housing company in two has built up a reserve fund for it. The information about the need for repairs therefore exists, but it does not always reach the buyer in time or in a consistent form. Banks, for their part, have begun to interpret condition survey reports more strictly than before: if a report mentions a ”risk structure” or that a structure is ”at the end of its technical life”, a loan may be refused even though the property's actual condition would call for a closer assessment. Three separate flows of information – transaction price, repair needs and eligibility for financing – are all creaking at the same time.
Individually these are technical details: an agreement ending, a percentage in a survey, a bank's interpretation. Together they draw a picture of a market that is losing its grip on itself precisely when that grip is needed most. In professional investing this is not a detail but a structural risk: pricing that rests on fragmented and delayed information is more prone to error in both directions, both overpricing and underpricing.
In sport, seeing the starting line is part of the race. A runner who cannot see where the line runs cannot time the start, however ready the legs are. The Finnish housing market is right now in a situation where many believe the start is close, but the line has become blurred precisely when seeing it would be decisive.
Disclaimer
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The article is based on public statistical sources and on Samla Capital's own market monitoring. The information has been compiled carefully and the figures have been checked against their sources, but their accuracy is not guaranteed.
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