How to apply for a right-of-occupancy apartment in a new property

Applying for right-of-occupancy housing in a new building in a nutshell

01

The apartments in the new building are made available for sale and the application period begins. The first application period will take at least two weeks.

02

Submit an application within the application period. Enter your right-of-occupancy waiting number in the application.

03

After the application period, we will offer all of the apartments in the building during the first round of offers.

04

All applicants are given a certain deadline for indicating which apartments they are interested in. Once you have received an offer from us, let us know which apartments interest you in your order of preference within the given deadline.

05

If it is possible to reserve an apartment for you based on your waiting number, you will receive a reservation confirmation and a request to provide the necessary attachments for resident approval.

06

If you are approved as a resident, you will sign a right-of-occupancy agreement and be required to pay the right-of-occupancy fee in two weeks from the signing date of the agreement.

07

The security deposit must be paid no later than two weeks after moving in.

1. Apply for a right-of-occupancy waiting number

You need a waiting number to apply for right-of-occupancy housing. Right-of-occupancy waiting numbers can be applied for via the waiting number service of Housing Finance and Development Centre of Finland ARA.

The waiting number will remain valid for two years from its date of issue. You can only have one active number at a time. If you are applying for housing together with your family, you will be granted a single shared waiting number.

The right-of-occupancy housing is granted to the applicant with the lowest waiting number during the offering round. For this reason, it is advisable to apply for the waiting number before the need for a new home becomes urgent.

2. Submit a housing application during the first application period

You cannot apply for an apartment in a new building before the first application period is reported to have commenced. We recommend subscribing to our newsletter to be notified of the application periods for our new locations.

You can also view interesting new apartments that are already available here.
Submit a right-of-occupancy application here.

Enter your waiting number in the application. At this point, you do not yet need to specify any individual apartment and can instead apply for all apartments in a building or a specific type, such as two-room apartments. However, when filling in the application, remember to select “New property” in the additional criteria section and indicate your preferred property on the application.

The first application period lasts at least two weeks, after which we send offers for apartments to our applicants, i.e. initiate the round of offers.

3. Apartment offer and reservation

Once you have received an apartment offer from us, you will have a specific period of time for notifying us of the apartments that interest you. Indicate the apartments in an order of preference: list the apartments that interest you the most first and so on.

Once the deadline for the round of offers has passed, we will go through the responses from the applicants. We reserve the apartments for applicants in the order of the waiting numbers and consider the applicants’ preferences.

Applicants for whom we cannot reserve housing remain on the waiting list and will be taken into account in the event of any cancellations. If an apartment has been reserved for you and you have confirmed the reservation, we will not be offering any more apartment options to you.

If you cancel a housing reservation after your approval as a resident, we will charge you EUR 200.00 as an agreement cancellation fee.

4. Resident approval

When an apartment has been reserved for you, you have a week to submit the attachments required for resident approval to a sales representative. The sales representative can provide more detailed instructions on the necessary documents.

Once you have supplied the attachments, the sales representative checks that the requirement on need for housing is fulfilled. You are not considered to have a need for right-of-occupancy housing if you or your adult family member has an equivalent owner-occupied apartment in the application area or enough wealth to finance at least 50% of the fair price of an equivalent apartment or renovate an owner-occupied apartment in the application area to a corresponding level. If you meet the housing need requirement, you may be selected as a right-of-occupancy holder, in which case we will set up the signing of a right-of-occupancy agreement with you.

The exception to this are applicants who are 55 and above and people changing to another right-of-occupancy apartment, whose need for housing and wealth do not need to be reported.

5. Signing the agreement, right-of-occupancy fee and security deposit

The agreement is made during the construction period. The right-of-occupancy fee, which is 15% of the purchase price, will be due in two weeks from the date of signing the agreement.

If the moving date is less than a month away, the right-of-occupancy fee will always be due before the move. The security deposit must be paid in two weeks from moving into housing.

If you decide to relinquish your right of occupancy during the construction period, we will charge a compensation for the premature termination of the agreement. The amount of the compensation is tied to the date of cancellation and the amount of the deposit.

6. Applicants who remain on the waiting list

If you are not offered housing during the first round of offers, your application will remain on the waiting list.

If the first round of offers does not yield residents for all vacant apartments, we will start a new round. We consider applications that have been previously placed on the waiting list in the order specified by the waiting numbers.

7. Estimated time of completion and moving

The times of completion reported for new buildings are always estimates. We will always indicate the final moving date once it is confirmed but, in any case, no later than a month before completion. As the move to your new home begins to draw closer, we will send you a letter of relocation. In the letter, we provide details on the moving date, key pick-up and the advance inspection of the apartment.

8. Applying after the first application period

You can also apply for housing in a new building after the initial application period. The continuous application period starts after the first application period. This means that you can submit a housing application for the right-of-occupancy building in question at any time. You should note that the building may not have available apartments at the time of application. However, the application will remain valid for 12 months, and we will take your application into account if apartments become available.