Decreasing demand without building houses

Abstract

With an increased population, many housing markets are experiencing a shortage, but the ability to resolve this through building new houses is limited. Demand in a housing market is caused not only by households without a house but also by those who are unsatisfied with their current housing. In the Netherlands, the housing market is unique because many houses are part of the social sector, a sector in which housing corporations decide the regulations on how houses are allocated. The question is whether different regulations can reduce how many households are unsatisfied with their current housing, thus reducing the total demand. Agent-based modelling (ABM) has been used to better understand various aspects of housing markets. It has not yet been used to model the Dutch social sector. In this thesis, a descriptive agent-based model of the Dutch housing market is created, with a focus on the effect of regulations on the demand of individual households. The main challenge of creating such a model is to create an abstraction that accurately captures the system of interest. The experiments show that the current model is limited due to some of the design choices. The results create insight into the impact of regulations and provides various directions for further research. The thesis provides a description of the Dutch housing market and a basis for agent-based models of this market.