Housing completions in Europe remain at a high level - further results of the Euroconstruct winter conference 2005

According to the experts of the Euroconstruct group, housing completions in newly constructed dwellings grew by three percent to nearly 2.35 million units in the 19 European countries of the group. The volume of residential construction in Europe continues to be dampened by weak new building activity that is only barely offset by the expanding renovation of the existing stock. For the current year the experts again expect a slight increase in housing completions but then the number of completions will decline somewhat until 2008. The reason is the continuing decline in single-family home construction in many European countries. The expansion of housing construction in multi-storied buildings will be too small to compensate, in terms of value, for the negative development in single-family houses.