In the first of a series of articles, 65DN looks at the perils and delights of trying to buy a house in Oulu.

Buying a house in Oulu can be complicated for an expat. There’s so much that Finnish people automatically know that many foreigners wouldn’t have a clue about.

For people from more densely populated countries, scrolling through the website www.EtuOvi.com (where most houses for sale are advertised) seems to reveal a huge stock of very reasonably priced homes. Many of these are detached, known as ‘omakotitalo’ (own home house) in Finnish. But there are enormous variations in size, age and price.

Some of these houses seem cheap. There is, at the moment, a house on sale in the suburb of Kynislehto for 149,000 euros. The wooden house is 110 square metres amidst an enormous garden and it has ‘4 rooms’ (this means three bedrooms and a sitting room) as well as a kitchen, bathroom, a garage . . . But closer inspection may lead to caution.

Big Heating Bills

‘There’s reasons why it’s that price,’ explains Teemu, 32, a builder who has recently built his own house. ‘You have to take into account how much money you’re going to be spending on heating it in the winter. It was built in the early 1960s . . . so they’re always more expensive to heat because they’re designed less efficiently. And then you have to think about how it is heated.’

Oulu houses are heated in three ways: oil, electricity or ‘kaukolämpö.’ The latter – known in English as ‘district heating’ – is by far the cheapest option. It is effectively a kind of recycling system where a power station is used to generate energy and the heat is not wasted, making it mega-efficient. Older houses do not tend to have kaukolämpö.

‘It can be set up,’ explains Anna, 50, an Oulu estate agent. ‘But usually only if the house is quite near a centre and other houses already have it. In that case, it might cost about 7000 euros. But it can cost up to 20,000 euros to have kaukolämpö installed. And in some areas it cannot be installed.’

And it certainly makes a difference. The oil-heated Kynislehto house has an annual heating bill of 1560 euros, that’s an average of 130 euros per month. Many houses built later – such as in the 1980s – have heating bills of up to 3000 euros per year, as they are heated with electricity. Some houses with Kaukolämpö have heating bills in the region of only 70 euros per month.

‘Heating is a big expense in northern Finland,’ insists Teemu. ‘So if the house price seems quite low, the heating may be very high.’

Recently Renovated?

Or the house may not be ‘renovated.’ Matti, an expat originally from Ireland, has long been bemused by the apparent importance of ‘renovation’ to Finnish buyers. ‘In Britain, people buy a house and then they completely do it up and make it their own,’ he says, ‘but, here, Finns seem to want everything to be already done for them so they don’t have to make any changes at all. This is one of the reasons why new houses are so much more expensive than houses built in the 1970s.’

‘Renovation’ is a huge factor in the price of an omakotitalo. Advertisements on EtuOvi.com boast, if they can, of how recently the kitchen, sauna, bathroom or whatever it may be has been ‘renovated.’

‘Trying to buy a house if you have a Finnish partner can be a soul-destroying experience,’ Matti continues. ‘You find a beautiful old, detached house and you’ll look at their face and know that they’re thinking, “It needs to be renovated” and you think to yourself, “Why?! It’s got character!” They are obsessed with everything being new!’

Of course, not everybody is. ‘I’ve just a bought a 1950s terraced house,’ explains Ilkka, 29, who did a history degree. ‘I like it. I like history. And I’m very proud of its history. I’m going to renovate it myself.’

Some houses clearly have a lot of work to do on them. With some older homes, unchanged since the 1960s, neither the cellar nor much of the upstairs are really inhabitable at all. In effect, you have a three floor home but can only live on one floor, and perhaps part of the attic is a bedroom. You may also find that the fixtures and fittings – such as the fridge or cooker – are so old and useless that you have to replace them (at great expense). The cellar is not included in the home’s legal amount of square metres, so if it’s been renovated this effectively adds about a third to the size of the house and – possibly – the price.

Location is Everything

And there are other bills to add to the cost of the mortgage. ‘With many houses, you buy the house but you can’t actually buy the plot it’s built on,’ explains Teemu, who is in this position himself. ‘You have to rent the plot.’ With older houses, the plot rent tends to be quite low. With newer houses, it can be a more significant expense – possibly pushing another thousand a year.

‘And, of course, location is important,’ argues Timo, 45, who is selling a house near Karjasilta. ‘A lot of the cheaper omakotitalos are very far from anything. There is nothing nearby. No schools, no shops, no bus-stop, no park. Nothing. It is just like living in the countryside.’

There may seem to be many houses on sale in ‘Oulu’ but some areas of Oulu are so far from the rest of city – sometimes separated by vast expanses of forest or farmland – that it is questionable whether you’re living in a city at all. You’re living – basically – in the countryside, with all of the disadvantages this has and few of the advantages, such as a village shop.

An oil-heated, reasonably renovated, medium sized 1950s wooden house (known as a Frontier-man’s house) in right on the outskirts might set you back 150,000 euros. However, in Karjasilta – walking distance from the town centre, a highly sought-after area – it could be 240,000 euros or even more for pretty much the same thing. Some houses in Oulu – new, nice area, big garden, quite large but not that much bigger than their competitors – are on sale for around 400,000 euros. You can, however, sometimes, haggle on the prices.

If you want a cheaper house, with many of the expenses taken care of, then you might consider a ‘paritalo’ (semi-detached) or a ‘riivitalo’ (terraced). Some people love them . . . others hate them. And 65DN will investigate them next week.

Housing Websites

In addition to www.etuovi.com, houses are advertised in the newspapers and, for example, on www.nettiasunto.com