Why Landlords Exiting the Dutch Rental Market Are Screening Out Internationals — Not Just Raising Deposits

A guy who owned three apartments in Rotterdam-Noord messaged us recently. He'd been a private landlord for nine years. After the Wet Betaalbare Huur (Affordable Rent Act) kicked in July 2024, he ran the numbers on his mid-segment properties and decided to sell all three.

He's not alone. In 2025 alone, investors sold over 65,000 rental homes in the Netherlands. Only 27,000 were bought back for rental use. That's a net loss of roughly 38,000 rental units — gone from the market in a single year.

The buyers picking up these ex-rental properties? Almost entirely owner-occupiers. Dutch residents getting their first mortgage, couples upgrading from a starter apartment, people who've been waiting on the sidelines. Not new investors. Not international buyers looking for rental yield.

So when you see headlines about a cooling Dutch buyer market — stabilizing prices, more negotiation room, sellers cutting asking prices — understand who's actually selling. It's landlords who've been regulated out. And every property they sell to an owner-occupier is one less rental on the market.

Here's what most internationals don't realize: Dutch law caps rental deposits at two months' base rent. Not two months plus a pet fee. Not two months plus cleaning. Two months. Full stop.

If a landlord thinks you're a higher-risk tenant — no Dutch rental history, no local employer references, a foreign passport — they can't just say "okay, give me four months deposit instead." That's illegal. You can take them to the Huurcommissie and they'll be forced to repay the excess.

This is the core problem. The Wet Betaalbare Huur extended rent regulation to the mid-segment — properties scoring up to 186 points on the Woningwaarderingsstelsel (WWS) system. Landlords who used to charge liberalized rents on mid-segment apartments suddenly found their income capped and their flexibility gone. Their main financial risk-management lever — the deposit — was already legally constrained.

So what's left? Screening. Pure, hard, aggressive screening.

I've seen what landlords are asking for in 2026. It's not a checklist — it's a filter. Passport. BSN. Dutch employment contract (not a foreign employer). Recent payslips from a Dutch payroll. Landlord references from previous Dutch rentals. Sometimes a Dutch guarantor.

If you just arrived from abroad for a tech job in Eindhoven, you don't have most of that. Your employer is foreign or you've been here two weeks. Your previous landlord was in Berlin or Bangalore. You don't have a BSN yet, or you just got one. Your guarantor lives in another country.

None of that makes you a bad tenant. You probably earn well above the threshold. But the landlord has 100 to 450 applicants per listing in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. They need to filter. The easiest filter is: who has the complete Dutch dossier?

The international applicant with a great salary but no Dutch payslips gets filtered out. Not because the landlord is xenophobic. Because the landlord has 300 other applications and a legally binding indefinite contract they can't easily terminate if things go wrong.

Dutch tenancy law has shifted hard toward tenant protections. The move toward indefinite contracts means landlords can't easily terminate a lease once it's signed. They can only end it under specific circumstances — and those circumstances are narrow.

Imagine you're a landlord who just sold three of your five properties because the new rent regulations made them unprofitable. You're keeping two. You're going to be extremely careful about who gets those two leases. If you sign an indefinite contract with someone who turns out to be a problem — unpaid rent, noise complaints, subletting violations — getting them out is a protracted legal process.

International tenants are perceived as higher risk. Not necessarily because they are, but because they're harder to evaluate. A Dutch landlord can verify a Dutch tenant's history with a phone call. Verifying a tenant's history from another country? Much harder. And the legal process for dealing with disputes across borders is more complex.

So the rational move for a landlord is to pick the applicant they can verify completely. That's usually a Dutch resident.

It's not just landlords doing the screening. Municipalities are actively making it harder for properties to end up as rentals — especially for international investors.

Amsterdam has introduced opkoopbescherming (buy-to-let protection) and permit requirements for mid-segment rentals. These rules can prevent new owners from renting out properties for several years after purchase. If you're an international investor looking for rental income, that's a dealbreaker.

Some municipalities have de facto policies favoring sales to local residents for newly released ex-rental stock. The political push is clear: prioritize housing for Dutch citizens in the face of a 400,000-unit national housing shortage.

So even if an international buyer wanted to purchase an ex-rental property and keep it as a rental, the municipality may block them. The property goes to a Dutch owner-occupier instead. Another rental unit disappears.

Let me put the numbers together, because the picture is stark.

Net loss of 38,000 rental units in 2025. Free-sector rents up 5 to 7 percent year-over-year. 42 percent of listings now above €2,000 per month. 100 to 450 applicants per listing in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. 5 to 10 viewings needed before securing a lease.

Institutional investors — the ones who could theoretically replace the private landlords who left — are focusing on new-builds and prime locations. They're avoiding the mid-segment and regulated properties because the regulatory risk is too high. So the rental stock isn't being replenished at the rate it's being drained.

For internationals, this means the rental market in 2026 is not just expensive. It's structurally smaller. There are fewer homes available. The landlords who remain have more applicants than they've ever had. And they're using every tool available — documentation requirements, income verification, guarantor demands, employer references — to screen down to the safest, most verifiable applicants.

That's not you, if you just arrived.

I'm not going to pretend this is easy. The structural disadvantages are real. But there are things that move the needle.

Get your BSN immediately. Get a Dutch bank account before you start applying — not after. Ask your employer for a Dutch employment letter with salary details, even if your contract originated abroad. Build a dossier: passport, BSN, employment contract, payslips, everything in one PDF, ready to send the moment a listing appears.

If you can get a Dutch guarantor — a colleague, a friend, anyone with Dutch income and a Dutch tax record — that changes your application from "risky" to "verifiable." It's the single biggest upgrade you can make.

And speed matters more than ever. With 100-plus applicants per listing, the landlord often takes the first complete dossier that checks every box. Not the best one. The first complete one. That's literally why we built House Hunter — because the difference between getting a viewing and not getting one is often whether you saw the listing in the first ten minutes.

The 2026 buyer's market is a relief for Dutch homebuyers. For international renters, it's a quieter crisis. The rental pool is shrinking, the landlords who remain are pickier than ever, and the rules that were supposed to protect tenants are the same rules that made landlords flee.