There is a clear tendency towards more business‐like approaches in the housing sectors in many European countries. The paper attempts to identify these approaches and related techniques with Dutch institutional real estate investors.
It has been investigated how real estate investors in The Netherlands decide about the physical and technical development and the tenure of their housing stock. In‐depth interviews have been held with several large real estate investors, which cover the majority of all dwellings in the sector.
Results show that investment allocations are only partly rationalised and are not in the least based on intuition. In addition, some elements of strategic asset management prove to be less common than we had expected from the commercial nature of these elements.
The research concentrates on the development of the total portfolio. In future research, individual estates can be selected for case studies, in order to assess to what extent the policies on portfolio level are carried out in practice.
The paper presents recent evidence on the state of professionalisation in the commercial housing sector.
