More and more private investors are buying houses as investments

The Ministry of Finance research also looked at the growth of private investors. The data used for this is between 2011 and 2018, so it is expected that the share of private investors is now even higher. The research shows that the number of transactions has increased substantially in recent years for all the different buying parties (start-ups, investors and other parties). The table also shows that the number of transactions by first-time buyers has grown the least, while the number of transactions by investors has grown the most. We also looked at the number of transactions in the four large municipalities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht).

Interestingly, the share of investors buying homes is significantly higher in the G4 compared to the rest of the Netherlands. It is also noteworthy that the share of investors in the G4 is higher than the share of first-time buyers in the G4. The figure opposite clearly shows that in all 6 cities studied, the share of private investors in housing transactions has increased. The extent to which, however, varies greatly by city. Amsterdam and Rotterdam seem to have seen the strongest increase, in both cases by more than 10 percentage points.

The Kadaster's research also shows that there are major differences between certain neighborhoods. For the Amsterdam region, in some neighborhoods the share of private investors in housing transactions exceeds 50% (over the period 2014-2017), while there are also neighborhoods where the share is less than 10%. Similar patterns can also be observed in the other regions. As a result, in the Eindhoven region it can happen that in one neighborhood the share of private investors exceeds 25%, while in the neighboring neighborhood the share is only 5% to 10%.

The Kassa program also conducted research on private investors and reports that in the housing market investors have never bought as many homes as in 2020. Of the homes in Amsterdam, The Hague, Utrecht and Rotterdam, 34 percent were sold to people who were not going to live there themselves. Of the approximately 8 million homes in the Netherlands, nearly 700,000 are now owned by private investors, who then rent them out. These can be small investors, but also large real estate funds from home and abroad.