Student accommodation disappearing from the market en masse

In September, a survey revealed that an increasing number of students are abandoning their search for student accommodation altogether and simply continuing to live with their parents. At the time, Kences, a knowledge centre focused on student housing, announced that the number of students renting from private landlords dropped to 17,000 in 2024. 

Land registry data has now fleshed out these figures: around 10,000 student rooms were sold between the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025. This concerns around 5,430 homes, with an average of almost two student rooms per home.

The other 7,000 or so rooms have been taken off the market. They are no longer being rented out because the property is likely to go on sale soon, says Kences Director Jolan de Bie. 

Amsterdam and Utrecht
According to Kences, the land registry figures show that many rooms have disappeared from the market, especially in the big cities. Amsterdam tops the list with 2,080 rooms, but Rotterdam (1,025), Utrecht (810), The Hague (790) and Groningen (695) have also lost many rooms. Utrecht is now the city with the greatest pressure on the room market, according to Kences.

Shortage increasing
The wave of sales follows the introduction of new tax rules for second-home owners. New rules that make it less attractive for homeowners to rent to students have also been introduced.

There is currently a shortage of over 20,000 rooms, but the sales wave is not yet over. At the current rate, 45,000 rooms could disappear from the market over the next few years. That is nine per cent of the total supply. "Never before has the student housing shortage been as acute as it is now. But this shortage is increasing significantly this year," affirms Kences.

Major decline
This weekend, the Dutch newspaper NRC also published an article about student rooms on the private housing market. The newspaper looked at advertisements for living spaces that are smaller than 25 square metres. Just like Kences, the newspaper also reported a significant decline over the past year.

According to the newspaper, the decline was particularly sharp in Delft, where the supply of student housing has decreased by 43.6 percent. At the start of the last academic year, there were 305 private rooms on the market, compared to only 172 this year. In Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht, the decline was around 30 percent, according to NRC.

Two hundred thousand euros for a room
The pressure on the market is evident in the fact that rooms are also being “sold” to students' parents for 100,000 to 200,000 euros each. Officially, one is not allowed to buy a room within another property, so buyers cannot get a mortgage for this sort of deal. These parents are only paying for the “right to use” the room.

Last week, the Minister of Housing, Mona Keijzer, warned parents to pay attention to what they are buying. After all, they might lose the “right of use” if the rest of the property gets sold to somebody else. The new owner is not obliged to respect the right of use of the rooms.

The municipality of Utrecht is critical of this type of deal, and it intends to investigate whether houses have been illegally divided.