The real estate investor European Residential Reit (Eres) has put 6,900 rental properties in the Netherlands up for sale. This confirms Mark Kenney, the CEO of the Canadian company, On The Financial Times. According to the Dutch business newspaper, this is “the largest real estate deal on the Dutch housing market in years”.
According to Kenney, Eres wants to free up money with the sale of the nearly seven thousand homes to invest in new-build homes on the Canadian market. The cabinet’s announced plans for the Dutch rental market also play a role in the decision of the Canadian real estate fund. “The interest rate situation is now unfavourable, regulation in the Netherlands has made it more difficult for us and tax measures have also made the Netherlands less attractive,” Kenney told the FD.
Eres is the Dutch portfolio of Canadian Apartment Properties Reit (Capreit), one of Canada’s largest home investors, with nearly 70,000 private homes in the North American country. The real estate investor has been active in the Netherlands since 2016. Eres has now collected real estate worth almost 1.7 billion euros in the Netherlands and the Canadian company is active in several Dutch provinces.
The last time that so many homes were sold at the same time on the Dutch property market was in 2019, when about ten thousand homes were sold by the British Round Hill to the Swedish Heimstaden. At the time, the deal was worth around 1.4 billion euros.
Cabinet policy
It is not known whether Eres is already in consultation with interested parties. The sale of the Dutch real estate portfolio by the Canadian company could become a difficult story, now that high interest rates have made it less attractive for investors to make large purchases on the real estate market.
In addition, the government has tightened the rules on renting out homes, as a result of which a large proportion of rents in the private sector will fall in the coming years. In an attempt to make it more difficult for large investors on the real estate market, the transfer tax has also been increased sharply in recent years, making the Dutch market less interesting.
The current cabinet policy does not help tenants, says Eres CEO Kenney to the FD. “They are actually saying to the private sector: we no longer want rental housing,” said Kenney. A study conducted earlier this year showed that the current government policy is only partly effective: investors are successfully kept away from the owner-occupied market and first-time buyers can find owner-occupied homes more easily, but the supply on the rental market remains limited, wrote the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the University of Rotterdam. van Amsterdam and the Kadaster in their investigation into the Purchase Protection Act.