Major investors in Dutch residential property have seen the value of their housing fall as interest rates rise, the Financieele Dagblad reported on Monday. 

Vesteda and Eres, for example, have had to write off hundreds of millions of euros on their rental properties in the first six months of this year.

“If you look back a year, a lot has changed, and has changed very quickly,” Vesteda’s chief financial officer Frits Vervoort told the paper. “Interest rates have an enormous impact on valuations. We now expect a longer cooling down period and a smaller devaluation,” he said. 

Real estate prices had risen sharply due to the low interest rates that made borrowing virtually free. Since last year, however, interest rates have tripled and valuation experts have downgraded property throughout Europe as investors look for lower prices as compensation. 

Vesteda is the Netherlands’ biggest institutional residential property group. Over the past year, the value of its 28,000 homes has gone down by €1.3 billion to €8.8 billion at the end of June, the FD said.

Canadian investor Eres, which has fewer than 7,000 homes in the Netherlands, also said last week its Dutch investments had lost €150 million in value and now stand at €1.6 billion. Eres told the FD earlier it is thinking of selling its Dutch portfolio to raise money to invest at home. 

Other large institutional investors are also revaluing their housing portfolios, Lennard Magis of real estate advisory group JLL told the paper. “We expect more in the third quarter although we have already had most of them,” he said.