The number of house sales in January plunged 48% compared with the previous month, the Telegraaf reports on Friday, quoting land registry figures.

‘January is always a bad month, but we have never seen a drop like this before,’ the paper quotes a land registry spokesman as saying.
The figures may be revised after they have been processed by the national statistics office CBS, the spokesman said.
‘Despite the reduction in mortgage interest rates, people are not daring to take risks,’ Hans Andre de la Porte, spokesman for the home owners association, told the paper.
‘This is like a buyers’ strike. In a normal week some 3,500 homes are sold, but now the figure is around 2,000,’ he said.