Beyond Tenure Status: A Four-Country Survey of Housing Aspirations, Expectations, and Motivations for Owning and Renting

Patricia Iglesias Muñoz , Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics
Sergi Vidal, Centre for Demographic Studies

Most research on housing relies on observed tenure, leaving what people want or expect—and the motivations behind these dispositions—largely understudied. Measuring subjective dispositions (aspirations and expectations) matters because they reveal unmet demand and constraints that shape housing trajectories and inequalities. We introduce a four-country survey (Spain, Germany, the UK, and Hungary) that jointly measures current, desired (aspired), and expected tenure, alongside the motivations underpinning these outcomes. A key innovation is equal attention to preferences for renting as well as owning, moving beyond the field’s ownership bias. Motivations are captured with a mixed-item design that combines open-ended questions—allowing respondents to articulate reasons for preferring (or not) each tenure—with closed Likert-scale items that record established motives, enabling both discovery and comparability. The target population comprises adults aged 18–65 in each country, with sample quotas aligned to age, sex, education, area of residence, and parental tenure. Our descriptive outputs assess alignment within the aspiration–expectation–tenure triad, inductively map motivation taxonomies from open-text coding, and summarize the salience of known motives from closed-ended questions. Patterns are assessed across national contexts and individual characteristics (e.g., age, gender, education, and urban–rural residence), as well as by parental homeownership and socioeconomic background, to illuminate intergenerational transmission. Together, these innovations provide the first cross-national portrait of what tenure people want and why, advance the measurement of subjective housing dispositions, and offer policy-relevant evidence on access barriers and inequalities across different housing regimes.

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 Presented in Session P7. Education, Labor Market, and Economic Issues