Instinct vs data in the Dutch housing market
The competitive nature of the current Dutch housing market throws up 2 significant problems for buyers:
- Finding a property that meets your criteria, and booking a viewing before all the slots are full, is surprisingly hard. Viewings slots are often full within hours of a listing going live.
- Even if you manage to view a property that you like, you don’t know what to bid, and it feels like complete guesswork.
Both these problems can be solved with access to AI, and the right data.
But most buyers, and their agents, are trying to solve them with instinct and personal knowledge.
How instinct and human knowledge fails in the Netherlands housing market
Buyers struggling to get viewings often end up spending a crazy amount of time on Funda, hoping that the next time a property listing pops up, they’ll be one of the lucky few who manages to see it and book a viewing in time.
Agents are able to help here, with access to lists of off-market, pre-Funda properties that they can book their clients into viewings for. But agents don’t necessarily have access to all property listings. They’re also humans who don’t work 24/7 and can’t always get their clients to the front of the viewings queue.
When it comes to bidding, again, agents are very helpful. Buyers trying to bid alone often feel completely lost. It’s the norm to bid over the asking price, but it’s very hard to know how much over you should go. A good buyer’s agent will have easy access to recent sold prices and local knowledge to help them suggest a reasonable bid.
The problem is, again, that they’re human. They might have extensive knowledge, but they’re still using gut instinct to suggest a bid. Realistically, they can’t effectively analyse 1000s of sales, local/regional/national trends, property condition and local developments with precision.
Agents are also usually paid a percentage fee, which means they have a natural incentive to encourage higher bids.
The data-driven, money-saving, stress-busting alternative
To win in today’s housing market, you need access to AI-powered systems and data.
At Roofmatch, we do this in two important ways:
- Our AI bots constantly search listings sites for new home matches, including the off-market listings that you won’t see on Funda. When a match comes up, it's sent to you instantly, so you can be one of the first to book a viewing.
- We calculate accurate winning bids using both our human expertise, and our smart AI calculator. This uses 12,000 data points including market trends, the property condition and energy label to find the bid that’s most likely to win.
Data is now your biggest potential advantage as a home buyer
Even without using a service like Roofmatch, you can find a good amount of relevant data to help you buy a home.
De Nederlansche Bank publishes regular information on house price trends, interest rates and mortgages.
The Land Registry has sold price data available (for a fee).
Private providers such as Huisvalue offer more wide-ranging data house price and location data (again, for a fee).
There’s no shortage of available data. The problem is interpreting it, and turning your interpretation into a bid that will win you the house you want.
Try to do this on your own, and you’re likely to end up more confused than you would have without all this information to draw on. That’s why even the best traditional buyer’s agents so often fall back on their gut instinct when providing bidding advice.
How AI + humans provide the best possible analysis
AI works differently from traditional market analysis because it can process enormous amounts of data at one time, with no delay.
It doesn’t need to spend hours frowning at a computer screen and drinking coffee to produce an analysis. And it’s capable of analysing far more, because unlike us, it doesn’t get tired.
Our AI-powered bidding calculator can analyse 12,000 data points instantly to produce a smart bidding recommendation.
That recommendation is then validated by our experienced buyer’s agents, taking into account your budget and needs.
Which means you get a recommendation that is:
- High enough that you stand a good chance of winning the property.
- Low enough that you don’t waste money.
It’s not certainty – no-one can provide that. Our clients win around 1 in 3 of their bids, which is by design. If it were more, that would mean many were overpaying. We’ve found that 1 in 3 is the sweet spot.
Less stress, more transparency and up to €50k saved
With Roofmatch, you could save €20-50k on your home. The AI analysis means that you’ll get a bid recommendation that is designed to avoid unnecessary bidding and save you money.
That’s why AI and data have already changed the Dutch housing market, and will continue to do so.
In a less competitive market, maybe the data wouldn’t be so important. As it is, guesswork-based bids, or those that rely on human analysis only, can’t compete with AI-assisted bidding.
Which means more stress for you, as you’re feeling your way through one of the biggest financial decisions of your life.
And it means that the process is entirely transparent. The AI calculator isn’t trying to increase their fee. It’s not influenced by its own limited previous experience. It’s not having conversations with friends.
It’s simply there to save you money. So you get as much as €50k off your house, plus all the human input and guidance you’d get from a traditional buyers agent.
Our fees start at €2,599 (likely around half what you’d spend on a traditional agent).