National Bank of Denmark working paper estimates working from home lifted Danish property prices by around 3–11 percentage points during the pandemic

The National Bank of Denmark published a working paper analysing how the pandemic-era rise in working from home affected housing demand and property prices in Denmark. Using linked survey and administrative microdata, it finds that increased remote working raised households’ propensity to buy homes and, for some groups, demand for more space, contributing to higher property prices. The study combines Statistics Denmark’s Labour Force Survey responses on working from home with register data on housing transactions and characteristics. People who mainly worked from home were more likely to buy a home during 2020–21 than in 2017–19, with the effect strongest among younger working-age groups, and there was evidence of larger home purchases among those working from home during the pandemic. A population-level approach that imputes the probability of working from home by job function and industry shows a stronger relationship between remote-work capacity and the likelihood of purchasing real estate during the pandemic, and indicates that homebuyers with higher remote-work capacity tended to increase their commuting distance more during 2020–21. At the municipal level, the paper reports a positive correlation between increases in remote working and property price growth, producing a range estimate that working from home contributed around 3–11 percentage points to property price increases during the pandemic.