Improvement of information for owner-occupiers about the quality of their house

Currently, policy issues and regulation concerning quality of houses are concentrating on new built houses, while each year, only 1% of new built houses is added to the total housing stock. Therefore, to maintain and improve the quality of the housing stock, a focus on the existing houses is necessary. The focus of this research is on owner-occupied houses; currently 56% of the houses are owner-occupied, and their share is increasing. Yet, maintaining or improving the quality of the owner-occupied housing stock is no policy issue in the Netherlands except for a few local initiatives. Although, according to recent research, considerable investments need to be made. The most recent memorandum of the Dutch Ministry of Housing about the policy for the next years (VROM, 2000), focuses on owner-occupiers as consumers. Freedom of choice by giving them authority is one of the main objectives in the memorandum. They state that this authority should be achieved by stimulating transparency of the housing market. Furthermore, recent developments show that there is a lot of attention for better information for homeowners and buyers. In the Netherlands and the EU several proposals for better information about the quality of houses for occupiers, homeowners and buyers are made. Each proposal considers different aspects of quality information, for example: health effects of housing, registration of quality marks, energy performance, guarantees, quality assessments etc. In economic theory about transactions, the fact that one person (agent) has more information than the other (principal), is known as information asymmetry. This asymmetry can occur between buyers and sellers of houses and can cause lawsuits, dissatisfaction, transaction costs or quality losses. Furthermore, the lack of information about for example health effects causes risks for the homeowner. Therefore, the main research question for this research is: how can information on the technical quality of houses be improved and to what extent does it make a contribution to improving and maintaining the quality of the owner-occupied housing stock?