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About Me

Hi. My name is Shane. I have lived in NL for 13 years and, like a lot of people, I rent my home from a landlord. I founded Rent Buster NL in 2022 after seeing first-hand the outrageous rental prices being asked by Makelaars/landlords in response to the Dutch housing shortage. My goal is to seek out and alert renters who moved into new apartments/ studios/ rooms in the Netherlands that their landlord may be overcharging them.

While there may be a massive shortage of housing in major cities, a large portion of the rental market is still subject to rent-regulation to ensure basic housing is affordable. Some landlords and estate agents ignore these price controls and grossly inflate the asking rent price of accommodation. Tenants are frequently unaware of their right to a rent reduction/fee refund or are too afraid to take action for fear of eviction, and are stuck paying thousands of euro extra per year.

I aim to inform and help as many of these tenants as possible via social media and mail. If you received a letter from me, then you likely are overpaying. Check out our FAQ for more information or send me a message for help.

How I work

If you received a letter from me and are convinced that you might be overpaying, it will be necessary to review your documentation (your contract and other agreements you may have made with the landlord to evaluate the strength of your case and determine if there are any unusual circumstances to your case. Timing is important and your contract type will dictate when to take action and when to wait.

In cases where my evaluation report of your apartment has too many uncertainties and unknowns, it might be required to perform a measurement of your apartment. If there are structural defects, maintenance issues or other problems with the building, I will note these down.

One approach I may suggest will be to contact your landlord and present your case to him/her. This is entirely optional but it can be helpful to ensure a fast and satisfactory outcome for all. Some landlords may be unaware of the rules of rent-regulation and the points systems and could be open to a deal.

In the event that negotiation fails, I will begin the initial rent assessment with the Huurcommissie to start the process of getting your rent reduced. Under most circumstances, this should be started within six months of moving in. The amount of time between the initiation and the judgement varies from case to case. Should we be successful, your rent will be reduced and everything you overpaid since the start of your contract refunded to you.

FAQ

The landlord/agency that has rented out the accommodation to you posted advertisements on popular housing websites that I check frequently. Your house/apartment was red-flagged as having suspiciously high rent. I performed a calculation and determined an approximate maximum rent price that you see in the letter. If the difference between this and the current rent price is within an acceptable level of accuracy, then I send a letter to your address a few weeks after the beginning of the contract. I do not know the name of the tenant or anything about the contract you signed.

My apologies. Many ads do not give the house number and sometimes I make mistakes in finding the house letter in multi-room complexes. If someone did recently move into your building, the letter is probably for them.

Aside from the numerous news articles written about me, Rent Buster NL is a registered company in the Netherlands (KvK nummer: 87138840), based in Arnhem with a Dutch bank account and phone number. I offer a free consultation via video call. You are not required to sign/pay anything and you can walk away at any moment.

Unfortunately no, it must be calculated by hand. It varies depending on many factors and changes every year due to fluctuations in the house prices, the layout, the energy rating etc. The gemeente in Rotterdam and Utrecht offer a rudimentary calculator on their websites but they only calculate a possible range of values and only within their respective cities. You can also use my calculator at the top of the page.
Links provided: Rotterdam , Utrecht

That is understandable. Finding places to rent in the Netherlands is difficult and it is possible that undertaking this procedure will sour the relationship between you and the landlord. If you do have a temporary contract, it is possible to wait until your contract becomes permanent before initiating the procedure. To prevent abuse, the Huurcommissie gives tenants more flexibility with the deadline for asking for a rent reduction (up to six months after the end of the temporary contract). Once your contract becomes permanent (or you leave) every thing you overpaid can be refunded to you.
Also this is only if you have fixed term contract (less than 2 years) and you want to stay longer. If you have a fixed-term contract and you are sure you want to leave at the end of it, then you have no added risk to eviction. If you have an indefinite contract then the landlord will be powerless to evict you for appealing the rent price. You will likely be able to stay there as long as you want. Should the landlord try to evict you, you will have an arsenal of tenant rights to fall back on to prevent your this. As long as you keep your nose clean there should be no reason your landlord can evict you and most CERTAINLY not because you exercised your rights as a tenant.

I have had personal experience with dealing with bad landlords who overcharge tenants. I dont like to see people get taken advantage of and I want to do something about it. Unfortunately it is not free to do this. I do want to do this full-time and, unfortunately, I am not a salaried employee of a rental organization. Operating a website, researching properties and sending letters costs money and I do have to pay my own rent and eat. Every amount donated helps me alert the next tenant who might be a position similar to you. If your approach to this arrangement is "Screw everyone else, I got mine" then Rentbuster is not the service for you. With regard to how much, that is determined by you: I operate on money you donate from a successful settlement. If I am successful, I may be saving you thousands of euro per year. You can decide how much my services were worth to you. Please note that similar organizations, such as Bumarang, demand for a large cut of the settlement (>50%) in exchange for the same service. Joke donations are not accepted and will be refunded out of principle. As for guidelines on how much to give: some people give 10% of the refunded amount, other give 5%, some give 1 month difference of the old to new rent price.

There are indeed many organizations that can help you with dealing with your landlord. Some of them charge for their services. They are also reactionary: They only respond to requests rather than the proactive approach taken by Rent Buster NL in seeking out tenants who don not know they are overpaying.
Of course you are perfectly capable of building your own case against your landlord. In fact, it is good that you show this initiative because the more people that do this, the better. My services are for those of you who dont have the time, energy or knowledge to deal with the paperwork, the back and forth with the landlord or the research required.

Nope, it is not normal. According to a 2016 Supreme Court ruling, a makelaar/estate agent is forbidden from representing both sides in a contract. They can only accept payment from the side that they represent. If you found the ad for the apartment you live in on a website, this means that the landlord has already engaged the makelaar's services and can only accept payment from him/her. Any fees charged to the tenant other than the rent are forbidden. This includes : key money, admin fees, registration fees, contract costs. There are many euphemisms for it. Most agencies do not charge these fees anymore but some are still trying to sneak them into the transaction, particularly if expats, who dont know the rules, are involved

Busting is the process of getting the rent price reduced on your home at the Huurcommissie. An apartment/studio is bustable if it scores below 136 points (July 2023) or has a projected new rent price of less than 808 euro. If it is big, energy efficient or situated in a historic building, then it likely will score too many points and be a Vrij/Free Sector (Unbustable)

Unfortunately not. I am the last person you want looking for a place for you. It is possible I am known to some Makelaars and doubt they have anything nice to say about me. If I ask them on your behalf for a place to live, they would likely suspect I was asking so I could bust the place later. However I do provide a weekly list of potentially bustable homes on my subreddit called the Hotsheets. You can find the link to my subreddit at the bottom of the page.

Call me. Until I get the Youtube channel up and running to answer these types of questions, the best thing I can offer is a conversation. I enjoy the distraction. Most of my day is spent looking at excel spreadsheets and Pararius ads.

An energy label is an important document that states how energy efficient your apartment/studio is. By law, the landlord is required to provide this to you when you move in. Many landlords dont have this document and before June 30, 2023, they were punished for this in a Huurcommissie case by having a label they obtained after you moved in excluded. This could mean a saving of 200 euro per month on your rent for this oversight. However the Dutch Supreme court ruled that this was unfair to the landlord, particularly if the living space was energy efficient. In principle the energy label can be included but it is determined on a case by case basis. I will alert you to the risks involved in this during your case.

COROP is a special designation that new or extensively renovated small (<40sqm) apartments/studios in Amsterdam and Utrecht get. If you live in a very new (Built after 2018) or very energy efficient building (A+++), your rent price is likely unbustable. I will of course check to make sure it qualifies.

On July 1 2024, new legislation is due to come into effect that will raise the border between regulated and unregulated housing and make 90% of rental accommodation subject to rules that will make the rent price controlled. That was before the Government collapsed. It is unclear if this legislation will pass now. In any case, only new contracts will benefit from this so if you signed your contract in 2023 or earlier and your home does not qualify under the current rules for regulation, then you wont be able to bust it in 2024.

Check out my subreddit I am very active on it and post many articles about renting in the Netherlands. I post all types of articles, useful calculators, tips for getting service cost refunds and some humourous material.

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