The number of rental properties in the Netherlands increased last year, despite  claims that landlords are selling some of their properties because of government plans to extend rent controls to more homes, the land registry office Kadaster said on Friday.

In 2023, investors owned 9.4% of the country’s housing stock, compared with 9% in 2022 and 8.6% in 2021, the Kadaster figures show. However, the increase is largely down to investment in newly-built properties by large real estate investors.  

The caretaker government has introduced several measures to stop investors snapping up properties that do come on the market and then renting them out for excessive sums of money. The transfer tax has been increased for landlords to 10.4% and rent controls are likely to be extended to cover most of the market. Local authorities have also been given more powers to control who gets to live where. 

The plans have led developers and investors to claim that it will soon become unprofitable to rent out property and fears that smaller homes, which are likely to fall under the new rent controls, are being sold off. 

But the Kadaster figures show landlords sold 33,400 properties last year, compared with 43,700 in 2022 and 65,000 in 2021. In other words, sales have almost halved in three years. 

“Since 2020 both the purchase and sale of property by both big and small investors has gone down,” the Kadaster said. “Investors are not selling more because of government measures and economic conditions, but they are buying less.”

They are also more likely to sell off properties to first-time buyers than to each other, which was the pattern in previous years, the Kadaster said.

The figures show that it is mainly large investors who have boosted their portfolios because they are more likely to buy large new-build projects such as apartment blocks that have been developed by private companies and are sold as completed projects. 

Up to 2021, small investors with fewer than 10 homes bought more properties from private individuals than they sold. But that is now shifting, and small landlords are selling more property to owner-occupiers than they buy, particularly in the bigger cities, the Kadaster said. 

According to the national statistics agency CBS, the Netherlands has 4.6 million owner-occupied properties and 3.5 million rental homes. Housing corporations own the bulk of the rental properties but 1.2 million are in the hands of private investors, ranging from “greengrocer on the corner with one property” to pension funds, the Telegraaf said.