In 2024, the housing shortage among students will also be enormous. To illustrate: According to the municipality of Eindhoven, 3,000 students are registered with Hospi Housing, which mediates between landlords and students looking for a room, while there are only 150 landlords. For each room, there are about 20 candidates. Remarkably, next semester only 50 students will actually find a room this way.

Anyone looking for a room in the “traditional” way is therefore dependent on the Internet: this is especially true for students outside the Netherlands. But searching for a room in Eindhoven online seems to be difficult. This forced Vestide, among others, to publish an online notice warning those looking for accommodation.

“Our houses and rooms are sometimes advertised on other websites or offered via social media. Often money is charged to see the entire offer. This happens without our permission. Sometimes it even leads to illegal subletting. Do not respond to this,” Vestide writes on its own website.

In practice, such cases do not occur very often. “This happened once this year with Vestide houses,” said a spokesman.

Although everything seems to be fine at Vestide, Huurteam Eindhoven is inundated with complaints about rental websites at this time of year. “It comes in waves. Many students are now looking for an apartment and we receive a lot of complaints. I can’t say exactly how many, but it’s certainly dozens,” says Nick de Liège, consultant at Huurteam Eindhoven.

“Sometimes these are actually websites that are not honest. These websites want visitors to pay to access their listing, but then it turns out that the listing simply comes from a website like Funda,” says De Liège. “Today I received a story from someone who reported a house that was supposedly for rent, even though that person knew that a friend of hers lives in the house in the photo.”

However, according to De Liège, these types of websites do not generate the most complaints. “Often, these are websites that operate more honestly. They then charge money to access their portal. We hear from people that these prices can be as high as 50 euros. And then only a few houses are listed and people don’t even get a response when they respond to something. It’s logical that you then feel cheated.”

“Rental platforms do not check their own offers”

Nick de Liège, rental team consultant Eindhoven

There is little that can be done about such websites, says De Liège. “These websites offer real estate agents or landlords a platform to offer their homes, but as a platform they do not check what kind of homes are being offered there. In addition, by paying the money, an agreement is made in which the home seeker accepts the risks.”

The biggest victims of the online jungle of landlords, real estate agents and brokers are foreign students, says De Liège. “They don’t know how things work here and have great difficulty finding an apartment.”

In this way, such housing complexes take full advantage of the huge housing shortage in the region. “We therefore always advise students to look for an apartment through the municipality. The municipality of Eindhoven has partnerships with some providers. Another place we refer international students to is the Expat Center. There they can also assess which parties are reliable. In addition, people can always contact the rental team with questions or to check their rental contract,” says De Liège.