Supply of rental homes, retail space continues to fall: ABN Amro

The Dutch real estate market is still very much in motion. The supply of rental properties and retail properties continues to fall, while the office market is showing signs of stabilization due to a new balance in home and office work, ABN Amro said in a new report on the State of Real Estate.

The supply of rental properties in the private sector is rapidly decreasing because more rental properties are sold into the owner-occupied market, partly due to stricter regulations and higher taxes. According to ABN Amro, the number of newly rented properties in the private sector decreased by half in three years.

The shrinkage of the rental sector is particularly bitter for single people, students, and for those whom buying a home is not financially feasible. Because the shrinkage is concentrated in large cities and owner-occupied homes are, on average, more expensive there than in the rest of the country, the accessibility of living in large cities is under pressure, ABN Amro said.

More and more physical stores are also disappearing due to online competition. This year, well-known retail chains like Esprit, Game Mania, and Bristol have all gone bankrupt. Blokker also filed for a deferment of payment this week.

Retailers are trying to lure customers back to the stores with “retailtainment” where customers combine shopping with a skate on the artificial ice rink, a live performance, or a virtual reality experience. Partly because of this, data company Locatus is now cautiously seeing a turnaround in the decline in the number of physical stores.

The Dutch office market has been through a tough period due to the sharp increase in working from home since the coronavirus pandemic. A balance between working from home and working in the office now seems to have emerged. According to the ANWB, traffic congestion seems to be decreasing slightly after a record year in 2023, in which a lot of traffic congestion was caused by employees traveling to the office en masse on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Data from Translink on public transport also show an upward trend in the number of travel movements on working days.