Pandemic-related stimulus and ultralow rates are turbocharging markets from Europe to Asia.
5 min
As the U.S. housing market booms, a parallel rise in residential real-estate prices across the world from Amsterdam to Auckland is raising fears of possible bubbles and prompting some governments to intervene to prevent their markets from overheating.
Policy makers were already worried about high property prices in parts of Europe, Asia and Canada before the pandemic, especially as years of low-interest rates kept demand strong.
But now the trillions of dollars of stimulus deployed worldwide to fight the effects of Covid-19, along with changes in buying patterns as more people work from home, are turbocharging markets further.
That is putting policy makers in a bind. Many want to keep interest rates low to sustain the post-pandemic recovery, but they worry about people taking on too much debt to buy houses whose prices could stagnate or fall later. Other tools they have to cool demand, like tighter mortgage restrictions, aren’t always working, or are being postponed as authorities try to ensure broader economic growth stays on track.
The Danish central bank recently warned that cheap financing and savings that expanded during the pandemic could lead to people taking on more debt to purchase houses and property prices spiralling upward.
“It is clear that rising [house] prices of between 5% and 10% annually, depending on the market we are talking about, are not sustainable in the long run,” said Karsten Biltoft, assistant governor at the central bank.
In China, regulators have tried tamping down property markets to cool what one senior banking official referred to as a “bubble,” to little avail. Property prices are up 16% over the past year in the city of Shenzhen, for example. In New Zealand, authorities recently tightened mortgage lending standards, with median home prices climbing 23% in February from a year earlier to a record.
In Sydney, where property prices also recently hit records, new mortgage demand is so high that some banks are struggling to keep up, said Christian Stevens, senior credit adviser at mortgage brokerage Shore Financial. Turnaround times for processing mortgage applications have increased from a few days to more than a month in some cases.
“It’s crazy,” he said. “We’ve never been this busy or seen this much inquiry. And it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down anytime soon.”
In the 37 wealthy countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, home prices hit a record in the third quarter of 2020, according to OECD data. Prices rose almost 5% on the year, the fastest in nearly 20 years.
The U.S. has also seen strong house price appreciation, though economists generally aren’t too worried. Compared with previous periods of housing-market exuberance, buyers have higher credit ratings and are putting down more cash upfront on purchases.
Economists see similar silver linings elsewhere, making a replay of the global 2008 housing crash, which sent the world into recession, unlikely. Hot markets could cool naturally without wider damage as interest rates rise and pent-up demand is met. As in the U.S., much of the buying globally is being driven by real demand rather than speculation, with families looking to upgrade to larger properties in suburban areas as they work more from home.
“There’s been this almost global reset as people have taken a step back during lockdown periods and reassessed their lifestyle,” said Kate Everett-Allen, head of international residential research at Knight Frank.
Strong home-price appreciation also makes homeowners feel wealthier and encourages more spending and construction, as developers build more supply.
However, with equities prices also at or near record highs, some officials are worried that vast amounts of stimulus are pushing asset prices to unsustainable levels in some global cities, which could lead to local market corrections.
The Dutch central bank told The Wall Street Journal that one concern is that sharp property price increases could be forcing households to take on excessive risk to finance home purchases. Prices in the Netherlands, where there is also a housing supply crunch, rose 7.8% last year, after a 6.9% rise in 2019, according to analysts at ING Groep.
Canada’s central bank governor, Tiff Macklem, said in February there were early signs of “excess exuberance” in the Canadian housing market, with prices up 17% on an adjusted basis over a one-year period, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. Mr. Macklem said officials would be monitoring the situation closely, but dismissed taking measures to rein in sales, saying the economy needed all the support it could get.
Governments say they are also worried about pricing more families out of the market, which could exacerbate economic imbalances that have worsened during the pandemic and potentially drive younger people to put off having children.
In Seoul, where house prices at one point last year were up nearly 15% on an annualized basis, some couples are postponing registering marriages in the hope of making it easier to buy homes. Income thresholds for low-interest mortgages in South Korea are more generous for individuals than couples.
In New Zealand, Sam Hindle, 29, says he and his wife bid on six houses and were rejected for all of them because of competition from other buyers, and eventually agreed to buy a house off-market from a friend.
“It’s just been a nightmare,” said Mr. Hindle, who works in a bank call centre and lives about a four-hour drive from Auckland.
Government officials recently told New Zealand’s central bank that it must consider the impact its policy decisions have on housing, though doing so could complicate rate-setting. The central bank also restricted the volume of high-risk mortgages banks can offer.
Last year, China put new limits on developer financing in the hope of cooling housing prices, but the market has remained frothy. In early March, the chairman of China’s main banking regulator said he was worried about a possible correction in home prices, which could threaten banks’ stability.
Europe’s housing prices have kept climbing despite a much bleaker economic outlook than in the U.S. or China. In part that is because governments have kept supporting families with salary subsidies and moratoriums on loan repayments. It is also because interest rates remain extraordinarily low, with mortgage rates averaging 1.35% across the eurozone.
In Denmark, mortgage holders have been able to borrow money at negative interest, meaning borrowers only pay the bank an administration fee. Negative interest in their favor either gets discounted from the fee or deducted from their mortgage principal.
Michael Stausholm, a Copenhagen real-estate agent, said he has sold 45 homes in less than three months this year, putting him on track to beat last year’s record of 161 sales, despite Covid-19 restrictions.
“A lot of people want to put their money in brick,” Mr. Stausholm said.
Pre-pandemic, the Dutch central bank ruled that banks would need to hold more capital to cover potential losses in mortgage-loan portfolios, but implementation was postponed because of Covid-19. The central bank has also called for the government to gradually phase out tax incentives for homeowners, including mortgage-interest deductions.
Mick ten Bosch, a real-estate agency owner in Amsterdam, said he had 450 people trying to view one house last year, compared with an average of 20 pre-pandemic. This year is even busier, with houses selling for 15% to 20% above asking price, he added.
Teun Kraaij, a 34-year-old entrepreneur, bought a house in an area by the beach near Amsterdam with more space for his two children. While he had enough money to pay the full purchase price outright, his banker advised him to take a mortgage with a 1.2% interest rate.
“It’s so cheap to borrow money nowadays, it doesn’t make sense not to do it,” Mr. Kraaij said.
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: March 28, 2021.
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Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.
5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
