Owner-occupied homes increasingly ending up on Dutch rental market

More and more owner-occupied homes in the Netherlands are ending up on the rental market. In 2017, almost 100 thousand homes that were not owned by a housing association came to be used as a rental home, Statistics Netherlands reported on Monday.

The number of owner-occupied homes that ended up in the rental market under non-housing association owners, increased significantly over the past years. In 2014 over 62,200 owner-occupied homes became available to rent. In 2017 that number increased to 98,900.

There is also a shift the other way around - rental properties being turned into owner-occupied homes - though this shift is not as strong. In 2017, 73 thousand non-association homes were withdrawn from the rental market and became owner-occupied homes, according to the stats office. In 2014 it was nearly 60 thousand.

Across the Netherlands, just over half of the former owner-occupied homes were being rented out by an owner who lived in the same municipality in 2017. But in the four large cities - Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague - former owner-occupied homes were more often rented out by owners who lived in another municipality.