Abstract
The deteriorating housing situation of young adults in many countries has become a subject of global interest. Researchers point to a number of factors that influence young adults’ decisions to own or rent a home. This paper examines the relationship between young adults’ inclination to own their own home and a range of different socio-economic factors. The study is of a quantitative-qualitative nature and was based on the results of a computer-assisted web interview (CAWI) questionnaire. The survey was conducted among young Poles aged 18–45 (n = 983). To analyse the results of the questionnaires, a logistic regression was used in which 24 different dichotomous and categorical variables were considered. Taking into account a number of individual characteristics (e.g., gender, education, hometown population size, etc.), the results show, for example, that single individuals and those with a higher level of tolerance for mortgage interest rates are more likely to own a home than to rent. This result highlights the desirability of easier access to mortgage credit. At the other end of the spectrum are those living with parents and those with dependents. The results imply that they are less interested in buying a home. Interestingly, declarations of a lack of funds for an own contribution when buying a new house/dwelling, or reluctance to expose oneself to financial difficulties throughout one’s life, do not discourage young adults from striving for their own dwelling, which further demonstrates the need to create appropriate mechanisms/instruments to facilitate the purchase of a dwelling for young adults.
Highlights
In public debate and in the literature, it has been debated for years whether it is better to buy or rent a house [1,2,3,4]
In the empirical part that follows, we focus on the analytical aspects, the presentation of the data and the model, the descriptive statistics and the methodology in order to better understand the intricacies of the contemporary housing market in Poland and the relationship between home ownership and renting in the context of young adults aged 18–45
Logistic regression is an efficient and powerful method to analyse the impact of a group of independent variables on a binary outcome by quantifying the unique contribution of each independent variable
Summary
In public debate and in the literature, it has been debated for years whether it is better to buy or rent a house [1,2,3,4]. From the cultural point of view, Poles in their majority still prefer to buy apartments/houses instead of renting them [10]. It should be noted that in purely economic terms, due to the coronavirus, every third person has lost part of their earnings and every twentieth person has been completely deprived of any income [11] It is worth being more prudent with all major expenditures, and the purchase of housing is one of them. Many young adults can only afford to take out a mortgage when they are 35 or older [6] Still another group of individuals cannot even afford to rent a flat, even though they earn more than the minimum wage [8,15,16,17]. This puts Poland well below the EU average, which is below 30 per cent
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