The cost of renting a room in a shared house in Amsterdam soared to an average of €948 last year, a 39% increase on 2021, according to room rental platform Kamernet.

In The Hague, room rents soared nearly 32% and in Breda almost 30%, Kamernet said. The Hague and Rotterdam remain the most expensive cities to share a home after the capital.

Gert Jan Bakker from tenants’ advisory group Stichting Woon told the Parool the prices are shocking. “Student rooms are subject to the point system [for setting rents] but few landlords stick to the rules,” he said. “That is problematic.”

According to student union Asva, international students are the main victims of the soaring prices. “They don’t have a choice,” said chairwoman Izabella Voortman. “They’ve no rights to social housing and no alternative, such as living at home.”

Nationwide, the average price for a room was €551 per month, a rise of 17.6% on 2021, when the Netherlands was in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic. But focused on the 23 largest student cities, the 2023 increase was almost 23% when compared with 2021 and 11% up on 2022, Kamernet said.

New legislation which requires landlords to give new tenants an official calculation of the rent, based on size and shared facilities, will be a “game changer”, Bakker said. Students and young professionals will then know the maximum rent which landlords can charge, and will be able to go to a rent tribunal to force a reduction.

Last month, a tenant who paid almost €2,000 a month for a 20 m2 room in a two-bedroom flat on Amsterdam’s city centre Keizersgracht had his rent reduced to just under €500 after taking his case to the rent tribunal.

Around half the properties on Kamernet were advertised by private landlords, a figure largely unchanged over the years in review. There has, however, been a “significant decrease” in the supply offered by real estate agents, and an increase in properties advertised by room mates since 2021.

Despite claims that the rental housing market is shrinking because of the introduction of more rent controls and higher taxes, Kamernet registered a 4.3% increase in the number of properties advertised on its website last year. However, between 2021 and 2022, during the pandemic, there was a 30% drop.

Kamernet is the largest rental platform in the Netherlands for tenants and landlords with approximately 60,000 properties – mainly single rooms – offered each year.