Negative sentiment on Dutch market is ‘misplaced’

The Dutch office market may be off-limits as the most ‘under-demolished’ in Europe, but now is the time to step into the country’s residential and healthcare properties.

That was one of the key recommendations of the PropertyEU Dutch Investment Briefing held at the Provada real estate fair in Amsterdam in early June.

The Netherlands has recently been hit by a wave of negative international publicity due to the high levels of office vacancies across the country. The creation of a ‘demolition’ fund to clear out outdated vacant commercial buildings and new rules aimed at tightening tax rebates on residential mortgages have created a lot of uncertainty in the market, noted Richard Geritsen, regional director at Yardi systems.

‘In terms of our business and demand for asset management tools, interest in the Netherlands has been pretty quiet although we’ve seen a lot of activity in the UK and the Nordics, and renewed interest in Central Europe.’

Nevertheless, the Dutch market is not performing all that badly in a European perspective, according to Bart Verhelst, senior director of capital markets at CBRE. Economic growth has slipped and is currently hovering around -1%, but that is not all that much worse than surrounding countries. And GDP per capita remains the highest in Europe after Luxembourg, he pointed out.

Unemployment is rising, but until recently it was amongst the lowest in Europe, while government debt and inflation are also under better control than in most other countries. ‘The Netherlands does have some problems with office vacancy levels with an aggregate figure of 15% and 28.3% for the worst district. But for other countries it’s not even possible to find average figures for the whole country.’

The full story appears in the July-August edition of PropertyEU.