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Buying a home in the Netherlands is a difficult ride, and a fresh wave of complaints suggests that, for many buyers, the process is both stressful and opaque. In just over four months, the homeowners’ association Vereniging Eigen Huis received nearly 1,000 reports about estate agents, and is now calling for legally binding rules to protect consumers.

Nearly a thousand reports

The reports came in through a reporting hotline that Vereniging Eigen Huis (VEH), the Dutch association for homeowners, reopened this year. In a little over four months, close to 1,000 people used it to complain about conflicts of interest, unclear bidding procedures and a lack of transparency in how homes are sold.

The complaints cluster around a few recurring problems. It still happens too often, the association says, that bids are accepted after the set deadline, that bidding logs are incomplete, or that buyers feel pressured to raise their offers. Often it is impossible to check afterwards which information was actually correct.

‘With an extra 10,000 euros, the house would be mine’

A case reported by NOS shows how this can feel from the buyer’s side. Maxime Lechner, who filed a report, had made an offer on an apartment on the advice of her buying agent. She was then told that her offer was not the highest, but that it had the best terms, and that a little more money would secure it. “With an extra 10,000 euros, the house would be mine,” she recalled. “That is a lot of money, but I went along with it.”

When she later asked to see the bidding log, she was warned straight away that it might not be complete, and she could find no bid recorded that was higher than her original offer. On further enquiry, she was given a different explanation: that the seller simply did not accept bids below a certain amount. “It is not clear to me exactly where things went wrong,” she said, “but the feeling remains that I paid 10,000 euros too much.” Though happy with the apartment itself, she was left feeling powerless. “I assumed the information was correct, even though I had a strange feeling about it. The least I could do was report it.”

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What the complaints are about

VEH has broken the reports down. The largest share, 28 percent, concerns conflicts of interest and preferential treatment, with people questioning how independently some agents act. About a fifth relate to agents influencing bids, and 23 percent to the bidding process itself: offers accepted after the deadline, verbal commitments withdrawn, or sudden extra bidding rounds sprung on buyers.

Some of the practices described are strikingly direct. Buyers report being told they may only view a property if they agree that the selling agent can also handle the sale of their current home. VEH is also critical of agents offering homes to their own clients or contacts first, before listing them publicly on the property website Funda days later. “Everyone should receive the same information simultaneously,” said VEH director Cindy Kremer. As far as the association is concerned, an agent should not be allowed to offer a property within their own circle before putting it on the open market.

A call for legal rules

The heart of VEH’s argument is that the current safeguards are voluntary and therefore toothless. “The housing market is not transparent,” Kremer said. “We have tried to make agreements with the industry, but the guidelines currently in place are insufficient. The consumer must be better protected by legally established rules.” The combination of an extremely tight market, where buyers are desperate and homes scarce, and the absence of binding legislation, she argues, makes it too easy for agents to bend agreements.

Her central proposal is that the ground rules of the bidding process be set in law, so that, for example, a sealed bid genuinely means a sealed bid, with all offers reviewed only after the deadline. At present, she notes, agents sometimes look at bids in the meantime and can then go back to other bidders. Only when such rules are legally established, she says, can they actually be supervised and enforced. VEH also stresses that it is the seller, not the agent, who decides who may buy a property.

This is not the first time this has happened. When it first opened such a hotline in 2021, it received 1,100 reports, after which the industry drew up an improvement plan; the bidding log itself was one of the results. That the complaints are flowing in again suggests, in VEH’s view, that voluntary reform has not gone far enough.

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What buyers can do

For buyers, especially those less familiar with how the Dutch market works, a few practical points follow from the complaints. It is worth engaging your own buying agent (aankoopmakelaar), who works for you rather than the seller, and being clear that the selling agent represents the seller’s interests, not yours. Buyers can and should ask for the bidding log (biedlogboek) after a sale, and treat vague or “incomplete” logs as a red flag. Be cautious about verbal assurances that cannot be checked, be wary of pressure to raise an offer against unseen “higher” bids, and remember that agreeing to hand your own sale to an agent should never be a condition of viewing a home. Anyone who feels they have been treated unfairly can report it to Vereniging Eigen Huis, and, in serious cases, to the relevant industry disciplinary body or the Consumentenbond.

Nearly 1,000 Complaints About Estate Agents…