The Dutch Antikraak Economy: Tens of Thousands Living Rent-Free as Institutional Property Guardians

How the Netherlands built a formalised sub-economy out of vacant buildings, housing crises, and a squatting ban.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Market • 2026-05-27

In a former university building in the centre of Leiden, students and young professionals are living in what used to be the Faculty of Humanities. The classrooms still bear institutional traces: long corridors, tiled floors, windows designed for administration rather than domesticity. The rent is essentially zero. The occupants are not squatters. They are antikraak residents, property guardians under formal contract with De Vastgoedbeschermer, a specialist vacancy management firm that took over Leiden University's North Cluster in summer 2024 after the faculty relocated to a new building. Across four buildings totalling around 20,000 square metres, the university's vacancy problem became a housing solution. The deal requires no rent, only utilities and agency fees, and can be terminated by either party with as little as two weeks' notice.

The Architecture of Antikraak

The antikraak system sits at a strange legal and economic crossroads. Antikraak residents are not tenants in any recognised sense of Dutch law. They are bruikleners: borrowers. The agreement they sign is a bruikleenovereenkomst, a loan agreement, not a rental contract. The building's owner retains full access. The agency can inspect at any time. The resident can be asked to leave on as little as 14 days' notice. In exchange, they occupy buildings that would otherwise stand empty, pay only utility costs and modest agency fees, and provide a physical deterrent against illegal squatting, vandalism, and decay.

The system has its roots in the 1980s, when Dutch property management agencies began responding to a thriving squatter movement that, by 1980, counted upwards of 20,000 people occupying vacant buildings across Amsterdam alone. By recruiting people to inhabit vacant offices, schools, monasteries, and former police stations, these agencies offered building owners a cheaper and more legally defensible alternative to traditional security. The first company to formally commercialise the model was Ad Hoc, founded in 1990. Camelot followed in 1993, and today operates not only across the Netherlands but in the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, and Belgium. The model it pioneered in a Dutch housing crisis became an export product.

The legal underpinning shifted dramatically in 2010, when the Dutch parliament passed the Kraken en Leegstand law, criminalising squatting with penalties of up to one year in prison. The move transformed the risk calculus for every building owner in the Netherlands. Where before a vacant property carried the theoretical risk of being squatted and slowly acquiring protected occupants, after 2010 the risk was entirely different: a building left empty was simply a target for rapid illegal entry. Antikraak agencies, already well-established, entered a new growth phase. By 2014, according to an ARTE TV report, an estimated 120,000 people were living in antikraak arrangements across the country.

The Scale No One Measures

Pinning down the current population of antikraak residents is genuinely difficult. The Dutch government has no official registry of the sector. Residents hold no conventional tenant status, appear on no housing registers, and generate no formal documentation that flows into national housing statistics. What is clear is that the sector operates at scale. A 2019 report estimated the annual turnover of the antikraak sector at approximately 150 million euros, with around 50,000 residents in arrangements offering no legal protection on the lease.

More than 50 specialist agencies now operate nationally. The major players include Camelot (now rebranded as Monoma), VPS, Ad Hoc Beheer, Villex, Alvast, HOD, Gapph, and De Vastgoedbeschermer. Their clients span a remarkable range of institutional property owners: universities, municipalities, housing associations, central government, churches, and private commercial landlords. According to an investigation by De Groene Amsterdammer, the national government has handed over some 200 offices, barracks, and other state buildings to antikraak agencies, while the largest municipalities together have directed roughly 900 properties into the system. The five largest housing associations in the Netherlands have placed over 1,100 homes under antikraak management.

The buildings themselves are eclectic by any standard. Former schools, decommissioned churches, redundant industrial units, disused office towers, vacant nursing homes, former police stations: all have served as antikraak properties. The sector has also moved into more unconventional territory, with former warehouses and large commercial units converted into inhabited antikraak spaces, their open floors subdivided into residential use. A vacancy manager operating in the Netherlands can, in a single portfolio, be simultaneously managing a listed heritage building, a 1970s office block, a redundant school, and a former factory unit.

What Institutional Landlords Get

For a property owner facing vacancy, antikraak offers a bundle of advantages that formal rental cannot match. A conventional lease in the Netherlands creates a tenant who can be extremely difficult to remove: Dutch tenancy law is tenant-protective, and a formal rental agreement hands the occupant rights that can outlast the landlord's development timeline by years. An antikraak arrangement, by contrast, creates no tenancy rights at all. The occupant is a borrower. Their removal requires two weeks' notice in the standard case. No lease, no protected status, no recourse to the Rent Assessment Committee.

For municipalities and institutions with buildings awaiting redevelopment, this is operationally invaluable. A university that hands its surplus faculty buildings to a vacancy manager can fill them with residents for the three or four years before construction begins, avoid the vacancy taxes that Dutch municipalities are increasingly imposing on long-term empty properties, and claim a marginal social benefit in reducing housing pressure. The PropertyNL sector survey published in December 2025 noted that, according to one vacancy manager, a property is still being illegally squatted on average once every three days somewhere in the Netherlands, making continued occupation a credible security argument even as the housing justification grows more prominent.

The Leiden University arrangement is instructive in its specifics. The university's Real Estate division has a standing protocol: for prolonged vacancy, buildings are transferred to De Vastgoedbeschermer to manage antikraak residents. The 2024 handover of the North Cluster, described on the university's own communications as intended to "alleviate the housing shortage in Leiden for students and others," covered four buildings at Matthias de Vrieshof 1-4, one of which is a rijksmonument listed heritage structure. The occupants keep the buildings in use. The university retains ownership, avoids vacancy tax, avoids deterioration risk, and retains the ability to clear the site with minimal legal exposure the moment construction financing arrives.

The Affordable Rent Act Effect

The regulatory environment for antikraak has been fundamentally altered by the July 2024 implementation of the Wet betaalbare huur, the Affordable Rent Act. The law extended rent controls into the mid-market segment for the first time, capping rents for all properties scoring up to 186 Housing Valuation System points at around EUR 1,157 per month. Officials in Amsterdam estimated that under the new framework, only around 25 percent of private rental properties in the capital would score above 186 points and remain in the free market.

The unintended consequence was immediate. Landlords who had been managing mid-market rental properties, particularly smaller investors and institutional owners with mixed portfolios, began exiting the formal rental sector in significant numbers. NVM realtors recorded a 22 percent rise in apartment transactions in the second quarter of 2025, substantially attributable to former rental landlords converting to owner-occupied sales. The housing shortage, which stood at 396,000 units at the end of 2024, was by early 2026 estimated by Capital Value to have risen to 410,000, with the rental segment particularly affected.

For institutional owners caught between rent controls they find unprofitable and a development timeline that makes long-term leasing impractical, antikraak has become an increasingly rational choice. An antikraak arrangement is not a lease. It does not fall under the Affordable Rent Act. It creates no regulated tenancy. It generates no maximum-rent obligation. The agency charges the resident a utility fee and an administrative cost, the building owner pays the agency a management fee, and both parties enjoy a relationship that sits entirely outside the framework that Housing Minister Hugo de Jonge spent several years building. By late 2025, PropertyNL reported that vacancy managers were observing growing demand from property owners and a clear political shift toward recognising the sector as a legitimate housing tool, with municipalities in Amsterdam and Utrecht piloting mandatory vacancy reporting and fines for owners of properties left empty for more than six months.

Life Without Tenancy Rights

The antikraak arrangement functions, for its residents, as a fundamentally precarious form of housing. The occupant is not a tenant under Dutch law. They sign a bruikleenovereenkomst that makes them, legally, a borrower of space. The agency retains a key and the right to inspect unannounced. Having children in the property is frequently prohibited. Overnight guests require notification. Alterations to the property, even minor ones, are forbidden. The maximum guardianship period under Dutch law is five years, though most residents move far sooner: the defining feature of antikraak life is not just low cost but radical impermanence.

This precarity has attracted sustained criticism from tenant advocates. The Bond Precaire Woonvormen, an organisation representing residents in flexible and temporary housing arrangements, has documented consistent abuses in the sector: residents asked to remove floors and fixtures containing asbestos without protective equipment, evictions with no compensation following building incidents, and fees structured in ways that deliberately obscure the real cost of occupancy. A 2019 FTM investigation examined a Camelot-managed building in Rotterdam where a fire left 50 residents with 24 hours to vacate, no compensation, and no legal recourse. Camelot, as is standard practice across the sector, offered no comment. As users rather than tenants, the residents had no claim.

A code of conduct for antikraak agencies was introduced in 2018, eventually covering around 70 percent of the industry. But adherence is voluntary and enforcement is not guaranteed. The sector remains what one investigative report characterised as a shadow vacancy industry operating tens of thousands of arrangements without government oversight, statistical tracking, or tenancy protections.

The Sector Gains Political Traction

The broader political climate appears to be shifting. The housing shortage, which by 2025 had reached its highest level in over a decade at approximately 395,000 to 410,000 units, has focused government attention on any mechanism that can activate dormant building stock. The Dutch government submitted draft legislation in summer 2025 to update the Leegstandwet, the vacancy law, granting municipalities stronger powers to require vacancy registration and impose fines on long-term empty properties. Vacancy managers told PropertyNL in December 2025 that they are increasingly seen, heard, and consulted by the national government. For Ad Hoc, one of the sector's founding players, the trend represents what the company characterises as a clear movement toward stronger municipal powers to actively address vacancy.

The broader numbers set the context. On July 1, 2025, more than 200,000 homes stood empty across the Netherlands, with Amsterdam alone counting 21,770 vacant properties. Against a government target of building 100,000 new homes per year, actual completions have repeatedly fallen short, reaching around 80,000 in 2025. The structural gap between housing demand and supply shows no sign of closing before 2027 at the earliest.

Whether this evolving recognition translates into formal regulation, better protections for residents, or simply more buildings flowing into the antikraak pipeline remains to be seen. The fundamental tension in the system has not been resolved: it works precisely because antikraak residents have no rights. Give them rights, and it becomes rental. Give them no rights, and you have tens of thousands of people living in institutional buildings under arrangements that can end in a fortnight, with no warning and no compensation.

The squatter movement that filled Amsterdam's vacant buildings in 1980 counted upwards of 20,000 people and generated a political crisis. The antikraak system that replaced it houses a far larger population, in far more buildings, with institutional contracts, university partnerships, and a growing political constituency. The squatters had no rights either, but they at least understood they were outside the system. For antikraak residents, the brochure presents something that looks like housing. The legal agreement says something else entirely.