Minister pledges to end secrecy on property foundation reports

Housing minister Elanor Boekholt-O’Sullivan has pledged to make information about property foundations accessible to home owners from next year, ending the current secrecy.

At the moment the information, which is a key part of getting a mortgage, can only be accessed by estate agents and banks.

Since April 1 a simple foundations check has become part of the big banks’ mortgage requirements but this is only done once buyers have made an offer. Foundations are graded A to E, with D and E labels requiring further research. Buyers whose potential property scores D or E could end up being denied a mortgage because of the cost of repairs.

The minister told consumer rights show Radar on Monday night that home owners had the right to know everything officials know about their property.

She said “all available and verified information” about the foundations of their property will now be included in a new section on the MijnOverheid website – a government-run digital information hub.

“People who are looking for a house should know what the foundations label is, as they do with an energy label,” the minister said. The new section will come online next year but it will take until 2030 for all the information to be included.

A survey of 750 members of Radar’s viewers panel showed that most buyers – 86% – do not make a foundations check a condition of making an offer on a house.

But if banks discover the foundations are faulty, they could end up denying the buyer a mortgage – leaving them with costs to pay for defaulting on an offer.

Thousands of buildings

Government advisory group RLI said in July that more than 400,000 buildings in the Netherlands have problems with their foundations or are likely to develop them in the next 10 years.

Buildings are sinking for a combination of reasons, including falling groundwater levels, bacterial erosion, drought, structural faults and the impact of construction work.

In around 120,000 cases the buildings are in urgent need of repair, the council said, and if nothing is done the cost of repairing the damage could add up to €54 billion.

Six in 10 home owners whose property needs urgent repairs to the foundations cannot afford to pay for them, financial services authority AFM said in April.