House Hunting in Finland: On the Baltic Sea in Greater Helsinki

A Renovated Three-Bedroom in Finland

$3.6 MILLION (3.3 MILLION EUROS)

This three-bedroom home sits on a wooded rise overlooking the Baltic Sea in Kirkkonummi, a municipality in greater Helsinki, in southern Finland. Located alongside a bay in an area called Langvik, the six-acre property has 650 feet of beach frontage and a dock.

A hotel restaurant sits across the bay, and the homeowners like to “take their stand-up paddle-board over the sea to the hotel and get their takeaway food,” said Manna Satuli, an agent with Snellman Sotheby’s International Realty, which has the listing.

Built in 1978, the 3,830-square-foot home recently underwent a complete renovation, incorporating high-end contemporary finishes throughout. It has geothermal heating and cooling, and two saunas, one steam and one wood-burning.

A front courtyard within an L formed by the house and an attached two-car garage has a large wooden terrace, decorative rock gardens and a fire pit. The glass front door opens into a ceramic-tiled foyer with a powder room. Directly ahead is the combined kitchen and dining area, with a wall of windows facing the water.

Finland is rapidly becoming much more urbanized, as young people increasingly gravitate toward the cities, especially Helsinki, the country’s most densely populated area. More than 70 percent of the Finnish population of roughly 5.5 million people now live in urban areas, according to a recent property market report from KTI, a Finnish real estate research company.

“As people graduate from universities in other cities, they tend to go to Helsinki,” said Jani Nieminen, the chief executive of Kojamo, Finland’s largest private residential real estate company and a major investor in the residential rental market. “Helsinki is the heart of Finland, and most of the new jobs are created there.”

He expects an additional half million people will be living in Helsinki and other cities by 2040.

Residential construction in urban areas has been relatively robust in recent years, with some 39,000 dwellings started in 2020, and 38,000 in 2019, according to KTI.

data from the Federation of Finnish Real Estate Agencies.

At the same time, average selling times for detached houses in greater Helsinki fell by almost a month.

must apply to the Ministry of Defence for permission to buy real estate in Finland. (Permission is not required to buy housing shares.) They must provide information about the buyer and the seller, and the intended use of the property. The application fee is 150 euros ($166).

Lawyers are not usually hired to handle routine transactions, although Ms. Satuli said she often advises foreign clients to use a lawyer because “we have to make sure everything goes by the book.”