Rental market in crisis: Available homes dropped by a third last quarter
The rental market is in crisis and the Cabinet needs to urgently intervene, according to the realtors’ association NVM and the organization for landlords Vastgoed Belang. The number of rental properties that became available in the last quarter of 2024 decreased by a third compared to a year earlier, while figures from the Land Registry show that 5,800 former rental properties were offered for sale.
“A logical consequence of the fact that many private landlords want to get rid of their rental properties due to a toxic cocktail of measures from politicians in The Hague,” the two housing market organizations said.
Since the announcement of the first measures against landlords, the number of rental properties that have become available has decreased every quarter, the NVM said. In the fourth quarter of 2024, the supply at NVM brokers was 6.7 percent lower than the previous quarter, 34 percent lower than a year earlier, and even 51 percent lower than the last quarter of 2022.
At the same time, the number of rentals sold into the owner-occupied sector increases every quarter. The Land Registry reported 5,800 such sales in the last quarter, adding that its figures are incomplete. It only includes landlords with three or more homes in its figures, the NVM and Vastgoed Belang said. “In doing so, they ignore around 350,000 small landlords, while a huge clearout is taking place among this group.”
On average, every rental listing now gets over 100 responses. In the Randstad area, it is often hundreds of responses per listing. “While only one candidate can become the lucky new tenant.”
According to the NVM and Vastgoed Belang, government measures like the Affordable Rent Act and linking rent increases to inflation and wage increases were meant to keep rents affordable, but are having the opposite effect. “In practice, we see that this is causing the supply in the mid-range rental sector - to which these measures apply - to decrease rapidly and that in the private rental sector - to which these measures do not apply - the rent is increasing significantly due to the additional demand.”
“People with average incomes who earn too much or haven’t been on the waiting list long enough for social housing and for whom the purchase market is in many cases inaccessible, are the victims of this,” the organizations said. “It is particularly ironic that precisely the groups that the government parties claim to stand up for, such as teachers, police officers, and students, are the victims of the current government policy.”
“I cordially invite Members of Parliament to come along for a day to see with their own eyes the dire situations that occur in the mid-range rental sector: young people who are forced to continue living with their parents, divorced couples who cannot leave each other, students who thought they were on their own two feet but are suddenly evicted from their rental home and have no choice but to return their parents. Because those are the consequences of all the sell-offs without any significant alternative,” said Lana Gerssen of the NVM.
The government recently postponed its assessment of the Affordable Rent Act from early this year to 2027. The NVM and Vastgoed Belang urged the government to move that evaluation back up. They also want the government to take targeted measures to preserve existing mid-range rental homes, instead of only focusing on building new ones.
“Landlords are selling their rental homes en masse and NVM brokers are ceasing their rental brokerage, while tenants are left disillusioned. Not affordability, but supply is the biggest problem in the mid-range rental sector,” Gerssen said.
