The 22,000 Homes That Vanished From the Dutch Private Rental Sector Last Year

Twenty-two thousand. That's how many homes disappeared from the Dutch private rental sector last year. Not moved. Not renovated. Gone — sold to owner-occupiers and struck from the rental register.

Kadaster data shows investors sold roughly 65,000 homes in 2025 while buying only 27,000. A net loss of nearly 38,000 rental units from investor portfolios, with about 61% purchased by people who intend to live in them. In Q4 2025 alone, over 20,700 homes were sold by investors — the highest quarterly figure since 2021.

In Amsterdam, the share of homes owned by private investors fell from 7.4% to 6.2%. That's roughly 5,000 rental homes gone from the capital alone.

I run a service that watches over 1,000 housing websites. We see listings appear and disappear in real time. What we're watching right now isn't a market correction. It's a segment being dismantled.

The Affordable Rent Act (Wet Betaalbare Huur) came into force in July 2024 and extended rent controls into the mid-market. Over 300,000 units are now subject to the Woningwaarderingsstelsel points system, with average rent reductions of €190 for new tenants.

For landlords, that meant the math stopped working. The annual increase is capped at inflation plus 1%, or wage growth plus 1%, whichever is lower — 4.4% for 2026. If you bought a property expecting market rents, the WWS points system just told you what you're allowed to charge. And it's less than you projected.

So landlords sold. Not the social housing stock — that was never theirs. Not the top of the liberalised sector — that's still profitable. They sold the middle. The €1,000 to €1,350 band. The exact segment where a working expat on a Dutch salary can actually find something without a waiting list that predates their arrival.

Here's where it gets uncomfortable. New mid-market stock is being built. Bouwinvest delivered 167 units in Alkmaar capped at €1,350. On paper, that's exactly the kind of housing internationals need.

In practice, those units are allocated through Dutch waiting lists and income tests. If you arrived in the Netherlands eighteen months ago with a BSN and a job contract, you're not clearing those filters. The allocation systems were designed for Dutch starters, not for a Colombian software engineer or an Indian nurse who moved here for work.

The sell-off shrinks the only segment where an expat salary beats a Dutch starter's position in the queue. And no policy in the current pipeline replaces it with anything internationals can access.

The abolition of the Fiscal Investment Institution regime removed a key tax advantage for foreign investors. The share of international investors in total transaction volume fell to 7% in 2025, down from a long-term average of 26%. Foreign capital's share in new development dropped from 32% between 2016 and 2022 to barely 1% in 2026.

Heimstaden and European Residential REIT have both initiated large-scale disposals, mostly through individual unit sales rather than portfolio transactions. That's the worst possible exit for renters — it converts rental stock into owner-occupied housing one apartment at a time, permanently.

The stock of rental housing owned by international investors declined to just over 72,500 homes in 2025, down from approximately 80,000 in 2024. Those homes aren't coming back to the rental market.

Rental supply in Q3 2025 was 37% lower than in Q3 2023, with the decline most pronounced in major cities. Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Den Haag — the cities where internationals actually find work — are where the sell-off is sharpest.

Meanwhile, rents in the non-regulated sector keep climbing. New tenants paid an average of €20.94 per square metre in Q2 2026, about 5% more than a year earlier. Gross rental yields averaged 6.28% in Q1 2026, with Amsterdam at 5.35% — the lowest in the country. That tells you landlords aren't getting rich in the capital. They're getting out.

The housing shortage remains at 4.8% of total stock in 2025. The government's target to reduce it to 2.0% by 2031 is unlikely to be met; projections point to 3.9% by that year. New-build completions are lagging, with less than half the 2027 volume currently under construction for 2028.

So the homes are disappearing, the replacement stock is locked behind waiting lists, and the shortage isn't closing. If you're an international renter in the Netherlands, the market you entered two years ago no longer exists.

The Affordable Rent Act was well-intentioned. It protected tenants in the mid-market from rent increases that had become genuinely absurd. But it also made those same homes unprofitable to hold, and landlords responded exactly as you'd expect.

The policy didn't create affordable housing. It converted rental housing into owner-occupied housing, which is great if you can get a mortgage. If you're an international on a temporary contract, a 30% ruling, or a BSN that's less than two years old, you can't.

The retreat of international capital also limits the potential for large-scale new supply. Without foreign investment, the large new-build projects that could add thousands of mid-market units become financially unfeasible. The shortage deepens while the stock shrinks.

I don't have a policy solution. I run a listing service, not a ministry. But I can tell you what I see every day: fewer listings, higher prices, and internationals competing for a shrinking pool of homes that were already hard enough to find. The 22,000 homes didn't just vanish. They were sold out from under the people who needed them most.