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Could Oslo’s rental market finally be about to cool off?

Rents in Norway's biggest cities have surged over the past few years. However, recent figures show that rent increases in Oslo may be about to flatten out.

Published: 4 April 2024 13:27 CEST

Pictured is the Oslo city scape.

Rental prices in Norway are rising, however there are signs of slower increases in Oslo. Pictured is the Oslo city scape. Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

The average cost of renting in Norway during the first quarter of 2024 was 12,323 kroner per month, according to the latest figures from the rental agency Husleie.no.

As has been the case over the past few years, Norway’s biggest cities have seen some of the fastest-growing rent prices.

Rent increases in Bergen, Trondheim, and Stavanger were all in excess of eight percent between the first quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year.

The cost of renting in Trondheim was 12,613 kroner per month, compared to 12,429 kroner in Stavanger and 11,875 kroner in Bergen.

However, things were slightly different in Oslo. While it remained the most expensive place in Norway to rent at 15,468 kroner per month, rents only increased by 2.8 percent.

The slower rent increase could signal good news for the rest of Norway’s property market.

“Rent prices in Oslo affect the entire Norwegian market, and that is often where we see the trends first,” Kjetil J. Olsen, general manager of Husleie, told the Norwegian newswire NTB.

Rising demand and decreased supply have been pointed to as factors behind steep rental increases in Oslo.

However, the bottleneck on the supply side may still be an issue, as Olsen said that more people were looking to rent outside of the city centre and that many ended up moving to commuter towns.

READ MORE: How much does it cost to rent in Oslo’s commuter towns?

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Is Oslo's project to speed up work permits on track?

For years, Norway has been grappling with a shortage of skilled professionals, notably in the technology and IT sectors.

Recognising the need to address this talent gap, The City of Oslo and other partners launched a pilot project in 2023 called Kompetansespor (Competence Track).

The primary goal was to reduce the lengthy wait times for skilled workers to get work permits from around nine months to three days.

READ ALSO: What’s next for Oslo’s plan to slash work permit waiting times?

But what is the current status of the project? And is the new super-fast work permit process any closer to becoming a reality?

How the project has evolved in 2024

Since its inception, Competence Track has evolved into a more ambitious project that goes beyond just cutting work permit times.

The project’s focus has shifted towards new goals, which mostly revolve around exploring the use of a “digital wallet” to streamline the immigration process.

To make this happen, partners involved in the project, such as the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI), will collaborate with other key stakeholders from the governmental, municipal, and private sectors.

READ MORE: How Norway’s permanent residence rules have been tweaked

As the UDI explains in a document seen by The Local, a digital wallet refers to “an electronic application or platform that allows users to securely store, manage, and share digital identity credentials and other types of digital data,” which plays a “central role in handling digital evidence or verifiable credentials in a digital ecosystem.”

The wallet allows relevant authorities to access the holder’s paperwork, rather than having documents and credentials stored separately across several portals.

New goals

The main aim for 2024 is to develop and explore an efficient and user-friendly process flow that can support the immigration of skilled workers to Norway.

According to a document that the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) shared with The Local, other goals for the year include creating a prototype to test the efficacy of the digital wallet in improving immigration processes, investigating the feasibility of pre-qualifying employers to speed up the immigration process, and showcasing how collaboration across sectors can create better services for users.

The project remains committed to reducing administrative burdens, processing times, and information exchange accuracy, as well as preparing Norway for future challenges related to global mobility and digitalisation.

Meanwhile, the Oslo Business Region writes on its website that additional target groups such as students and family members of work permit applicants would be included in the fast track residence permit scheme.

From the information available at the time of writing, it seems that project will still revolve around Oslo.

Gustav Try, an advisor at the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI), told The Local that the UDI’s Department of Managed Migration is currently working on a new test phase called “Pilot 2.0”.

“We are currently working on Pilot 2.0, but it is not finalised. The plan is to pilot it on selected students at the University of Oslo (UiO) in August. We are also considering piloting it on skilled workers, including UiO employees, throughout the autumn,” the department said.

Back in September, Thea Ullhaug Pope, senior content developer for the City of Oslo, told The Local that one of the long-term ambitions of the project is to try and get the scheme adopted by other regions and then nationally.

However, while the Competence Track project continues to progress, it seems unlikely that the initial ambition of reducing work permit waiting times from nine months to three days will be achieved on a mass scale anytime soon.

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