The Dutch housing nightmare continues: fewer houses for sale in the Netherlands than ever

By the end of last month, 16,500 houses were for sale on the Dutch market. That’s 44% less than last year, meaning the lowest number ever recorded at the end of a quarter.

NVM (the largest association of real estate owners and appraisers in the Netherlands) says to NU.nl that the overheated market means that the gap between homeowners and home seekers is widening.

Are we surprised? 🙄

Better bid now — but only above asking price

If you’ve been lucky enough to find a suitable house on sale in the Netherlands, you better lock it down fast. Homes are only listed for approximately 23 days before finding new owners!

That’s the shortest amount of time houses have been on the market ever. 🏃‍♂️

READ MORE | Bidding on a house in the Netherlands: how to win

But not only do you have to bid fast, but you also have to overbid the other hopeful (desperate?) new homeowners. On average, buyers paid 8.6% more than the asking price in the past three months — echt!

The difference between asking and selling price is largest for terraced houses: landing at 10.7%, and lowest for detached houses with an average of 4.1% difference.

Shocked by the prices offered, real estate agent and chair of the NVM Housing Department, Lana Gerssen, told NU.nl that she consistently sees buyers bidding “top prices to trump other buyers.”

What do you think of the Dutch housing market? Tell us in the comments below!

Feature Image: Jeroen Stoop/Wikimedia Commons/CC3.0

Christine Stein Hededam 🇩🇰
Christine Stein Hededam 🇩🇰
A Dane with a special place in her heart for Minnesota, Christine is now falling in love with everything Dutch. Between finishing her bachelor’s degree, learning Dutch, and doing yoga teacher training, you will find her wandering about the Hague. Always up for visiting new places, she loves to explore the Netherlands with friends and takes pride in scoping out cute cafés (wherein to discuss books, big plans, and food).

1 COMMENT

  1. Would be interesting to see some journalistic investigation into the ‘artificially’ created part of this shortage – only in Amsterdam Blackstone owns 300 houses and another guy, what’s his name, 100, one of which squatters tried to break into during the recent Woon Protest. All these are unoccupied as they don’t want to bother with rental stuff and are held purely for speculation and selling later on for higher price.

    These are only the houses we know of, I imagine there’s way more. If all of them were released to the market tomorrow, we would not be seeing this madness anymore. Housing is a right, not speculative investment, go play stocks instead.

    Would be great to see some investigation of this and of course see the government do something instead of picking their noses stupidly as per usual.

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