Keywords: Housing cooperatives; housing tenure; stated choice experiment (SCE); The Netherlands
The Dutch housing market has a shortage of long-term affordable dwellings. The ownership structure
of a housing cooperatives ensures that dwellings are guaranteed to be affordable in the long term by
excluding the sale of dwellings. This form of housing tenure is almost unknown in the Netherlands but
is gaining political and social interest. Empirical evidence that the housing cooperative is a preferred
form of housing tenure based on it is attributes is lacking. This study sought to provide evidence that
there is a demand for housing cooperatives as a new form of housing tenure. The study used a stated
choice experiment to examine underlying preferences for attributes of various forms of housing tenure.
Subsequently, it was possible to deduce which form of housing tenure is preferred and to what extent
the housing cooperative is a viable alternative. Homogeneous preferences were derived by use of a
multinomial logit model which showed that the monthly cost of a dwelling is the most important aspect
in choosing a form of tenure. The use of a latent class model made it possible to identify differences in
the relative importance of preferences between two classes of respondents (N = 945). The main
difference is that class one (52.3%) indicated that they would not choose one of the alternatives presented
in the stated choice experiment, however, they seem to prefer an owner-occupied dwelling. The second
class (47.7%) might show a preference for the housing cooperative, and it can therefore be concluded
that the housing cooperative is a preferred form of tenure. Both groups indicate that at all times the
private rental form is not a preferred form of housing tenure.