Almere's Vacancy Tax Sounds Great. It Won't Help Internationals Find Rentals.

Almere made headlines as the first Dutch municipality to implement a leegstandbelasting — a €2,000 annual tax on homes left empty for a year or more. The policy kicks in from January 2027, and the city estimates around 400 long-term vacant homes fall under it.

The Dutch housing shortage is 410,000 units. Four hundred homes is rounding error.

Even if every single vacant property in Almere magically appeared on the rental market tomorrow, it wouldn't move the needle nationally. And Almere isn't even where most internationals are looking. Amsterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag, Eindhoven — those are the cities where expats and knowledge migrants are fighting for listings. Almere is a commuter city. It was built to relieve pressure on Amsterdam, and it still carries that identity. Rents are lower — a modeled 2-bedroom sits around €1,550/month — but it's not the first address on anyone's relocation list.

So the tax operates on a scale and in a location that barely intersects with the actual problem it's supposed to address.

When the Wet Betaalbare Huur (Affordable Rent Act) capped mid-range rents in July 2024, the prediction was that landlords would exit. That prediction came true: a net loss of 38,000 rental homes in 2025 alone. Investors sold off properties that could no longer command market rates.

The same pattern will repeat with the leegstandbelasting. The owners holding those 400 vacant homes in Almere aren't sitting on them out of laziness. They're waiting — for a sale, for a price point, for the right market conditions. A €2,000 annual charge won't change their strategy. It'll accelerate it.

Here's the math. A 2-bedroom property in Almere generates roughly €18,600 in gross annual rent against a purchase price around €345,000. Net yields sit at 3.2–3.8%. That's thin. Now add the administrative burden of Dutch tenancy law — indefinite contracts under the Wet vaste huurcontracten make it harder to evict, compliance costs money, and landlords have become increasingly selective about who they let in.

Faced with a vacancy tax, an owner who was already hesitant to rent will simply sell. The home leaves the rental pipeline entirely and enters the owner-occupied sales market. The mid-rent segment — the one internationals actually depend on — shrinks a little more.

We've watched this pattern at House Hunter. Every time new regulation lands, the rental supply dips and the sales pipeline ticks up. The leegstandbelasting will be no different.

Vancouver's Empty Homes Tax is the most cited precedent. Vacancy rates dropped from 4.6% to 1.4%, and over 15,000 properties came back to market. Sounds impressive. But rents and prices kept climbing. The tax reduced vacancy without improving affordability — the core problem for anyone trying to find a place to live.

France introduced a vacancy tax in 1999 and saw a 13% reduction in vacancy rates over four years. Most converted units became primary residences, not rentals. The mechanism worked, but the outcome wasn't more rental supply — it was more owner-occupancy.

San Francisco and London ran into the same wall: exemptions, loopholes, and the simple reality that property owners find ways to hold. Renovation claims, temporary family use, shell companies. The evidence is consistent across jurisdictions. Vacancy taxes reduce the number of empty homes. They do not meaningfully improve access for the people who need rentals most.

Almere's tax is €2,000. Vancouver's tax reaches 5% of assessed property value. If Vancouver's stiffer penalty couldn't move affordability, Almere's modest charge won't either.

€2,000 per year on a property worth €345,000 is 0.58%. That's not a penalty — it's a parking fee.

An owner waiting to sell at the right price will absorb that cost without blinking. Capital appreciation on Dutch property has outpaced that figure comfortably. The owner who's holding out for €360,000 instead of €345,000 isn't going to be rushed by a €2,000 annual charge. They'll wait another year, pay the tax, and still come out ahead.

In London, low vacancy taxes had only a "slight" effect on bringing homes back to market. The owners who paid were the ones who could afford to. The owners who couldn't afford to had already sold or rented. The tax catches the comfortable, not the strategic.

The recurring nature of the charge — it's not a one-off fine — is meant to build pressure over time. But against property values in the hundreds of thousands and rental yields that barely clear 3.5% after costs, the math doesn't force a decision. It just nibbles at the margins.

Let's say the tax works perfectly. Every vacant home in Almere returns to the market. Internationals still face the same wall they've always faced.

Dutch landlords increasingly require proof of income at three times the monthly rent. They want a complete application dossier — payslips, employer statement, sometimes a Dutch guarantor. The Wet vaste huurcontracten made indefinite contracts the norm, which means landlords are more selective, not less. They can't easily end a tenancy, so they front-load their risk assessment.

An expat arriving without a BSN, without Dutch payslips, without a local rental history? They're not winning a competitive viewing against a Dutch applicant with permanent employment and three years of tax returns. It doesn't matter how many units enter the market if the selection criteria systematically disadvantage newcomers.

We see this every day at House Hunter. Users find listings within minutes of going live — that part works. But getting a landlord to actually say yes? That's the bottleneck. A vacancy tax in Almere doesn't change landlord selection criteria. It doesn't standardize documentation. It doesn't create English-language rental pathways. It doesn't address the structural barriers that keep internationals locked out of the market they can see but can't access.

What Almere's leegstandbelasting actually does is set a political precedent. It signals that municipalities are willing to act, that empty homes are no longer socially acceptable, and that the era of passive property holding is ending. That matters symbolically.

But symbolism doesn't house people.

The Dutch housing crisis is driven by population growth, limited land, construction bottlenecks, and the mass exit of private landlords following national rent caps. A local tax on 400 homes in a commuter city doesn't touch any of those forces. The Wet Betaalbare Huur alone removed 38,000 rental units from the market in a single year. Almere's vacancy tax might — optimistically — add 400 back. The math is off by two orders of magnitude.

If other municipalities adopt similar taxes — and they will, because the optics are good — the pattern will repeat. Owners will sell. Rental stock will shrink further. The mid-rent segment that internationals rely on will continue to hollow out. And politicians will point to the vacancy tax as evidence they're doing something.

The only real fix is national: more construction, better investment incentives, and rental market reforms that don't punish landlords into selling. Until then, a vacancy tax in Almere is a gesture. A well-intentioned one, but a gesture nonetheless.

For internationals searching for housing in the Netherlands, the leegstandbelasting changes nothing. The listings they need aren't sitting empty in Almere. They've already been sold.