Almost half of the country’s housing corporations do not carry out proper income checks on prospective tenants, even though they are supposed to focus on low-income households, the Financieele Dagblad reports on Wednesday.

Of the 233 corporations investigated (around half the total), 42% did not check tenants’ income, the research by research bureau Van Nimwegen showed.
Rent controlled properties, which account for around 50% of the Dutch housing stock, are supposed to be reserved for low-income households.

Higher earners
But in Amsterdam, for example, some 30% of rent-controlled property is lived in by people who technically earn too much to qualify. With high rents outside the social housing sector and the shortage of cheaper housing to buy, there is little incentive to move in the capital.
One advantage of this to housing corporations is that richer tenants are more likely to pay their bills, the paper says.
Liberal MP Brigitte van der Burg told the paper the results of the survey are ‘unbelievable’. If housing corporations are renting out homes to people on average incomes, they have too many properties at their disposal, she told the paper.
Housing corporations run around 2.4 million homes, or one third of the country’s housing stock. Around 50% of the country’s houses are owner-occupied, the rest owned by private landlords.