Do you want to rent a house or a room in Rotterdam? Then you have to dig deep into your pockets. "The biggest cause of the increased rental prices is not investors, but a combination of the rapidly rising demand for rental housing in combination with little available supply," Matthijs Korevaar, assistent professor at the Erasmus School of Economics and currently a guest lecturer at Columbia Business School in New York, recently told NRC Handelsblad. His research focuses on the Dutch housing market.
Investors are often seen as the culprit, but they have no influence on the market price for a rental property. "The rent is determined by the market: it is worth whatever you can get for it. You can't ask 2,400 euros a month for a house in Delfzijl, but you can in Amsterdam. An investor never has so many properties that he or she is a monopolist and can determine the price themselves," he explained in the newspaper.
Newcomers in Rotterdam
In Rotterdam, too, the rental of rooms and houses is a commercial market: there is a lot of demand but few rooms, and that makes them quite expensive. "The consequence of rent regulation is that people who already live somewhere are protected, but newcomers pay the price. Because are there more people but not more houses? Then especially the rent on new contracts in the free sector goes up." So if you come to Rotterdam to study or work, you notice that. People who still want to live in the city are more likely to share a home (which of course students already often do) or live in a studio. Others choose not to live in the city or further from the center.
But not only the price, but also the low supply is a problem. "In the Netherlands, we currently have huge demand but a small supply of rental housing for two reasons: there are long waiting lists for social rent with little extra houses being built there, and we discourage private landlords with measures compared to other buyers," Korevaar says from New York.
These measures include an increased property transfer tax and, in Rotterdam, purchase protection in sixteen districts around the center, including the Kralingen student district. The so-called keep-to-let, a phenomenon about which Het Parool recently interviewed Korevaar, is an exception. This is a growing trend: home owners who move houses keep their houses to let. In this way, they can rent out a house without being affected by the aforementioned measures.
What does society consider desirable?
Another exception is the purchase of homes for a first-degree relative or child. "What we find desirable and not desirable is subject to trends and the economic situation. In the Netherlands we currently don't think it's desirable for someone to buy a home to rent it out to someone else, but through politics, we approve of buying a home for, say, a student child."
"I think it is important for a country to have a decently functioning rental market, but it is not clear what the long-term political vision is," said Korevaar. And in the short term, there is no solution to the current problems.
