The Pattern the Hague Misses

Statecraft Position Paper · By Jacob Huibers · April 2026

The mechanism in four layers

A sharp data point from the Dutch real-estate market: in 2025 more than 2,700 vacation homes were listed for sale via NVM brokers (the Dutch estate agents’ association), the highest number in fifteen years.¹ Annual wealth tax on a vacation home (the Netherlands taxes imputed returns on private wealth above a threshold; the regime is known as Box 3) has grown in five years from a few hundred to over 8,000 euros.² VAT on short-stay accommodation rose from 9 to 21 percent as of 1 January 2026.³ Park fees and maintenance on top. Private owners are exiting. Blackstone, KKR and Capfun are stepping in through vehicles where Box 3 does not apply.⁴ The conclusion: this is not a market outcome, this is policy.

The diagnosis is correct for this dossier, but stops at the surface. The same pattern has played out over twenty years across housing, agriculture, primary healthcare, childcare and infrastructure. Same outcome each time: small owners are taxed or regulated out, institutional capital fills the void. Nowhere is this an explicit policy choice. Everywhere it is the sum.

“Individual measures each have their own rationale. Together they do not yet form a blueprint.”

One, fiscal or regulatory signal. A discrete measure with defensible grounds: a Box 3 reform after a Supreme Court ruling, VAT harmonisation to level the playing field, the nitrogen rules in agriculture, manure quotas. Each instrument is owned by one ministry and tested within one rationale.

Two, asymmetric cost impact. Private owners and family firms absorb the full burden. Institutional players have arbitrage routes individuals do not: holding structures, foreign domiciles, tax facilities, compliance at scale. What costs an owner on the island of Texel 8,000 euros a year costs a Luxembourg-based PE vehicle close to nothing.

Three, outflow and inflow. The small owner sells, exits, or moves abroad. The institutional party buys up, bundles, optimises. Within three to five years the market quietly consolidates into a handful of large owners.

Four, irreversible anchoring. Capital sits in structures that cannot easily be reversed. Foreign investors are treaty-protected through bilateral investment agreements; PE funds have long-term commitments with pension funds and insurers. By the time the pattern surfaces in public debate, usually a decade later, the outcome is institutionalised.

Same script, different sectors

Vacation real estate is the latest performance, not the first. These four layers are not coincidence. The Hague (the seat of Dutch national government and shorthand for it) has no instrument to test the sum of separate measures against ownership structure. What is missing has a name: statecraft. The pattern becomes visible the moment you look across sectors rather than within them.

Sector	Fiscal / regulatory signal	Outcome	Period
Housing	Box 3, Affordable Rent Act, landlord levy, property-value reassessment	Private landlords sell (18,000 rental homes in 2024, mostly to first-time buyers); institutional landlords grow on balance through new construction5	2018 – now
Agriculture	Nitrogen rules, manure quotas, phosphate rights, EU subsidy regime	Family farms exit; pension and investment funds buy land	2015 – now
Primary care	Insurance-tariff pressure, administrative load, inspectorate quality demands	Practices sold to PE roll-ups (dental, physiotherapy, veterinary, eye clinics); chain formation in general practice precedes PE entry	2016 – now
Childcare	Childcare allowance regime, quality regulation	Private-equity chains have built a position of ±12% of provision in an otherwise fragmented market; the three largest chains hold ±13% combined6	2010 – now
Vacation real estate	Box 3 increase, VAT on short-stay accommodation from 9 to 21% (2026), transfer tax 10.4% (2023-2025) reduced to 8% (2026), steep property-value rises	Owners sell en masse; Blackstone (RCN, 2025), KKR (Roompot-Landal, 2020), Capfun (21 Dutch parks) step in	2023 – now
Infrastructure	Privatisations of the 1990s and 2000s, energy unbundling act	Essent (RWE, 2009), Nuon (Vattenfall, 2009), Eneco (Mitsubishi/Chubu, 2020), parts of port operations pass into foreign hands	1998 – 2020

The mechanism is the same each time: asymmetric cost impact, outflow of private or family ownership, inflow of institutional or foreign capital, irreversible anchoring.⁷ No one in The Hague has the mandate to assess the sum of these measures.

Four load-bearing principles

I. Systemic impact test. Mandatory test of ownership structure and market concentration before any fiscal-regulatory instrument is introduced, run across ministries rather than within one.

II. Explicit ownership choice. Make explicit which type of owner the country wants per sector: private, cooperative, institutional, or foreign.

III. Symmetric fiscal treatment. An arbitrage route that lets a private-equity vehicle bypass a tax that hits an individual is design work, not an enforcement problem.

IV. Multi-decade horizon. Model policy on 10- and 20-year market-structure scenarios, not on four-year cabinet-cycle returns.

Keystone

“We make no choice. We let the sum choose. And that choice is irreversible.”

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Statecraft is the thinking practice on governance under House of Viridian.

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Colophon

“The Pattern the Hague Misses” is a position paper in the Statecraft series Dissociated Organisations.

Statecraft is the platform of Jacob Huibers for strategic reflection on public-service delivery.

Response and counter-argument via Statecraft.

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Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years’ experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and project lead for municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants and for regional inter-municipal partnerships.

Footnotes

1. NVM figures for 2025, as reported in NOS, ‘Beleggers willen van vakantiewoning af, particulier wacht meer af’, 23 April 2026: more than 2,700 recreation homes listed for sale via an NVM broker, the highest number in fifteen years; the average selling time rose to 84 days and buyers paid on average 3.4 per cent below the asking price. ↩

2. Worked example in De Telegraaf, March 2025, reported among others in Accountancy Vanmorgen, “Belasting op vakantiewoning stijgt: ‘scheve situatie’”, 31 March 2025: for a vacation home on the De Krim holiday park (Texel) with an assessed value of 385,000 euros, the Box 3 levy rose from 2,904 euros five years earlier to 8,150 euros. ↩

3. 2025 Tax Plan (Belastingplan 2025); Tax and Customs Administration, ‘Vanaf 1 januari 2026: btw-tarief logies omhoog naar 21%’. The reduced rate of 9 per cent continues to apply to campsites. ↩

4. Blackstone-RCN: ACM (Authority for Consumers and Markets), ‘ACM: Blackstone mag RCN Vakantieparken overnemen’, decision of 17 July 2025, concerning nine Dutch parks. KKR-Roompot: KKR press release, 18 June 2020, on the acquisition of Roompot Group from PAI Partners; Roompot completed the acquisition of Landal GreenParks in 2023. Capfun owns 21 Dutch campsites and holiday parks (Consultancy.nl, 7 July 2025). ↩

5. On the table, housing: Kadaster (land registry) figures for the fourth quarter of 2024, as reported in NOS, ‘Particuliere investeerders verkochten vorig jaar 18.000 huurwoningen’, 27 February 2025: the rental stock held by private investors shrank by 18,000 homes in 2024; 65 per cent of the rental homes sold went to first-time buyers. The stock of large institutional landlords grew on balance by 15,000 homes over the same period, mainly through new construction. ↩

6. On the table, childcare: SEO Economisch Onderzoek, De markt voor kinderopvang — de rol van private equity binnen de kinderopvangsector (The market for childcare — the role of private equity in the childcare sector), report 2023-38, April 2023, commissioned by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment and presented to the Senate as final report: private-equity-linked childcare organisations supply about 12 per cent of total daycare and after-school provision. Kinderopvang-Wijzer, ‘Top 100 grootste kinderopvangorganisaties op concernniveau (juli 2024) — marktaandeel’, reference date 29 July 2024: Partou 7.5 per cent, Humankind 2.8 per cent, Kind & Co Ludens 2.8 per cent of child places; at the end of July 2024 the national childcare register listed 2,909 providers. ↩

7. On the table: the general transfer-tax rate of 10.4 per cent, which since 2023 applied to homes that are not the owner’s main residence, was reduced to 8 per cent as of 1 January 2026 (2026 Tax Plan). For the energy privatisations: Essent was sold to RWE in 2009, Nuon to Vattenfall in 2009; the sale of Eneco to the Mitsubishi Corporation/Chubu Electric Power consortium was completed on 25 March 2020 (Eneco press release). ↩