'Property sector won't recover until 2011-2012'

Prospects for the Dutch real estate sector will not pick up until 2011 or 2012, according to Nout Wellink, president of the Dutch Central Bank, in an exclusive interview with PropertyEU's sister publication PropertyNL. Next year won't be much better than 2009, Wellink said, adding that vacancies will continue to rise while prices will be pressured further. 'We cannot avoid the major underlying currents of this crisis and its international dimension.'

The interview was held on the eve of the Provada real estate fair which gets underway today in Amsterdam. Wellink said the exceptional circumstances in which the Dutch economy currently finds itself have not been seen since the Second World War. 'We need to have some confidence in the future, some confidence in the strategy of the real estate sector which is focused on quality, to get us through these difficult years.'

Wellink pointed to the difficulties of achieving fair valuations as one of the causes of the current financial crisis. 'How do you deal with poorly functioning markets and markets that have come to a halt? And then there's the question: how do you come to valuations in such markets? You really have to watch out that if you don't deal with this properly, you may cause the market to break down even further. This is an issue that is clearly key in the real estate sector and is one that that my team and I will examine more closely.'