CBRE's Student Housing Forecast Is a Subtraction Problem, Not a Construction Problem

CBRE's numbers are not subtle. Since 2022 the Netherlands has added roughly 5,000 student rooms a year. In the twelve months between early 2024 and early 2025, about 10,000 rooms disappeared from the market. That is the two-for-one in plain sight: we build one, we lose two.

The forecast gets worse. Up to 45,000 more student rooms could vanish by 2027. The national shortage sits around 20,200 as of late 2026, and some projections put it between 26,000 and 63,200 by 2032/33.

Every headline I read about the kamernood treats this as a supply problem. Build faster, build denser, cut the permit queue. But the mechanism is subtraction, not construction. The stock is draining faster than the tap is filling, and the drain is in a specific segment of the market.

That segment matters more than the total. The rooms being lost are not interchangeable with the rooms being built.

The contraction is driven by private landlords leaving the student segment. New rental regulations, higher taxes and fiscal measures have made renting to students less attractive, and a lot of that stock is being converted to owner-occupied homes. The regular rental sector — the part students actually depend on — is shrinking.

Think about what a particuliere kamer actually is. A room in a landlord's building, often no registration at the address, no Dutch language required, no income check that a first-year international can pass. You find it on Kamernet or through a Facebook group, you pay a deposit, you move in. It is not pretty. It is the only segment many internationals can access at all.

Now think about what replaces it. A new-build student complex, often delivered through a housing corporation or a PBSA operator, with a waiting list, a registration requirement, a BSN, sometimes a Dutch-language tenancy process and a rent that clears the liberalised threshold. The building is better. The access is narrower.

So the two-for-one is not just a numbers game. It is a swap. We are replacing accessible rooms with inaccessible ones and calling the net result progress.

The 430-unit Schiedam/ProRail conversion is exactly the kind of project that gets held up as the answer. Four hundred and thirty units near a train line, delivered at speed. I am not going to pretend that is nothing. It is real supply in a real city with a real transport connection.

But run the arithmetic. Four hundred and thirty units against a national deficit above 20,000, against 10,000 rooms lost in a single year, against a forecast of 45,000 more gone by 2027. It is a rounding error with a ribbon.

And the units are not neutral. They come with eligibility rules. They come with a process. The international student who was renting a kamer in Rotterdam-Zuid from a private landlord — the one whose building is now being sold and converted — does not automatically qualify for a ProRail-adjacent unit in Schiedam. They join a queue they did not previously have to join.

Every new complex is a net loss for the international who cannot qualify for it, because the rooms being demolished from the private stock were the only segment they could access. That is the sentence I want people to sit with.

Dutch students are increasingly staying at home or giving up the search. That is a real response to the shortage, and it is rational. It is also a privilege that does not transfer.

An international student arriving in Utrecht or Groningen or Delft does not have a parent in Zaandam with a spare room. They do not have a family network that knows a landlord. They cannot commute from the family home in Eindhoven. When the private stock contracts, they do not fall back — they fall into substandard, unsafe or illegal housing, and they are more exposed to scams and discrimination.

Nuffic's work on international students in the Netherlands keeps landing on the same point: the housing crisis is not distributed evenly. It is absorbed by the people with the fewest alternatives. The Dutch student who stays home is not competing for the kamer that just disappeared. The international student is.

That asymmetry is why the aggregate shortage number is misleading. A deficit of 20,200 is not felt as 20,200 units of equal pain. It is felt hardest at the bottom of the market, where the private kamer used to be.

The undersupply is pushing rents to some of the highest levels in Europe, and CBRE's European PBSA outlook flags the Netherlands' position as a global education destination as being at risk. That is the market telling you the same thing the subtraction data tells you.

When the cheap, unregulated, no-questions-asked segment shrinks, the price of what remains goes up. The new-build PBSA product is priced accordingly — it has to be, given construction costs and investor returns. It is not a charity. But it means the replacement stock is structurally more expensive than the stock it replaced.

I have watched this play out in the enquiries we get at House Hunter. People are not just looking for a room. They are looking for a room they are allowed to apply for. The gap between those two things is where the crisis actually lives.

A forecast that counts builds and ignores losses will keep telling you the market is recovering while the renters at the bottom keep telling you it is not.

The fix is not complicated to describe, even if it is hard to do. Start counting the rooms that leave the market with the same seriousness we count the rooms that enter it. Publish the net figure. Make it the headline.

Right now the kamernood forecast functions as a distraction. It points at construction as the lever, when the actual mechanism is the exit of private landlords from a segment that regulators have made less attractive to operate in. If the policy goal is more student housing, the policy question is why the private kamer is disappearing — not how many cranes are on the skyline.

I am not arguing for a return to the worst of the private stock. Some of those rooms were genuinely unsafe, and the enforcement that came with regulation was overdue. But there is a difference between improving a segment and deleting it, and the current numbers suggest we are doing more of the second than anyone wants to admit.

Until the Netherlands counts losses alongside builds, every new student complex will be sold as progress while the international student who needed the room that just vanished is left with a waiting list and a higher rent. That is the arithmetic. It does not care about the press release.