Will there be enough rental homes in Finland’s growth cities when the economy picks up?

I built a model from public statistics to estimate how long vacant rental homes will last in Finland’s ten largest cities. The short answer: in most cities, roughly two to four years. If the 2025 pace of net migration continues, Helsinki, Tampere, Turku and Kuopio may reach the limit as early as 2028 or 2029

Where my concern came from

The second prompt came from Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s largest daily newspaper. It reported that Helsinki City Housing (Heka) is losing rental income because of vacant flats. Readers would have benefited from a sense of scale: Heka owns around 55,000 homes. About 1,700 of them are vacant and offered to tenants, and another 1,700 are under renovation. If the homes under renovation are counted as empty, the occupancy rate is about 93.8%. Without them, it is about 96.9%. 

What I calculated

Instead of comparing organisations, I decided to compare cities. Then my appetite grew. I wanted to know how quickly the current rental housing reserve would melt away if housing production stays low. A shortage would show first as rising rents in the non-subsidised market, and then as growing demand for affordable – that is, state-subsidised – rental housing.

Here, the reserve means vacant rental homes that can be taken into use before the occupancy rate reaches 98%. I treat 98% as the practical ceiling, because letting a home always takes some time. Coverage shows how many years of housing need created by net migration the reserve can meet.
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The model includes state-subsidised production under the 2025 short- and long-term interest-subsidy loan decisions, which will be completed by early 2027 at the latest. It does not include new non-subsidised production. I also ran broader scenarios that include completed but still unsold new-build homes for sale held by developers and vacant right-of-occupancy homes, should a proposed legislative change bring them to the market. 

Try it yourself

​In the chart below you can choose between six views. If you select two different units, for example net migration and coverage, both are shown in the same chart on two axes. A missing value means missing input data, not zero.

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Rental housing reserve in Finland’s ten largest cities

Select one or more views. When you select two different units, the second one is shown as points on the right-hand axis.

Show figures as a table

Reserve = additional occupancy available before a 98% occupancy rate. Baseline 1 Jan 2026. Coverage shows how many years the reserve meets the housing need created by net migration.

A missing value means missing input data, not zero. New non-subsidised production is not included in the summaries.

Source: Finreim Oy, Housing Reserve Review 2026 (5 Oct 2026).

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What the figures tell us

​My conclusions are cautious, but the direction is clear:

1. The next few years look manageable. Including the 2025 loan decisions, the state-subsidised reserve covers net migration for roughly two to four years in most cities – and clearly longer in Jyväskylä and Oulu.
2. The pace of migration is decisive. Net migration to Helsinki in 2025 was about 9,300 people, against a ten-year average of about 5,600. At the average pace, Helsinki’s state-subsidised reserve lasts almost four years; at the 2025 pace, about 2.3 years.
3. Across the whole rental stock, the situation is tightest in Turku, Kuopio, Tampere and Helsinki. At the 2025 pace of migration, the reserve in these cities lasts less than three years.
4. New production will not come to the rescue quickly.Funding decisions made now will therefore determine supply in 2028–2029.

Finland’s general government debt is around 90% of GDP. There is unlikely to be extra money in the budget. I therefore see a real risk that, under the current model, there will be a shortage of affordable homes around 2030. The risk can be reduced by developing financing models and improving needs assessments so that the information is available to everyone in the housing market.
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Who are we building homes for?

Here, I have not broken net migration down into domestic migration and immigration, as doing so would lead to a misleading generalisation. A more useful breakdown would be to examine the reasons people move to the city: work, studies, starting a family, retirement, and so on. This would be an important next step, as the question also concerns labour mobility within Finland and the EU. Social housing policy aims to provide homes for people in vulnerable situations. Less often is it asked whether housing supply affects employment in the city.

Both perspectives matter. Can the non-subsidised rental market alone house people who move for work – and will it continue to carry the risk, as it has done so far? Fortunately, many people living in state-subsidised rental homes are in work. That makes neighbourhoods more diverse.
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We need more precise information on whether practical nurses and other workers in essential roles can find a home that matches their income within a reasonable commute of their workplace.

Don’t forget the existing housing stock

​The most economically sensible approach is to look after the existing housing stock and secure financing for renovation and energy-efficiency improvements. EU programmes are available for this. In Finland, however, they are probably not well enough known – the state’s deep pockets have been so close at hand.

How the model was built

For each city, the model combines public statistics on the situation at the end of 2025: net migration 2016–2025 and in 2025 (domestic migration and immigration), the number of residents and households, average household size, the shares of rental and owner-occupied housing, the numbers of occupied state-subsidised and non-subsidised rental homes, owner-occupied homes, and occupancy rates for state-subsidised and non-subsidised rental homes. Ongoing state-subsidised production is based on the 2025 loan decisions. A few projects that do not add to the number of rental homes have been removed (Tampere and Turku). The model can be updated once the 2026 statistics are published.

I used AI to search for and compile the public statistics. I described the model step by step and accepted or corrected the AI’s suggestions. I had the model’s formulas and principles checked by a second AI program. I have not verified every source figure against the original source, so the results should be read as indicative.

​Predicting the future is difficult. Extrapolating statistics forward is always an educated guess, and households’ choices may differ considerably from the past. In the end, residents choose their own form of housing – not the authorities or the industry.

What next

The model can be refined. Working together with stakeholders who hold the data would make the forecast more reliable, and it could be extended to owner-occupied housing production, to districts within cities, or to an individual rental housing company’s portfolio. If your city, rental housing company or financing institution needs this kind of needs assessment, let’s talk. You’ll find my contact details at finreim.

My next post will look at how the financing of affordable housing could be developed. Follow Finreim on LinkedIn to read it first.

Petri Suutarinen, Finreim Oy​