Buying a house in Leiden as an expat: a mortgage on a research contract, and the 1930s streets

I am Jiri, an estate agent in Maastricht. Leiden is a university town that happens to sit between The Hague, Amsterdam and Schiphol, and that combination is exactly why it is hard to buy in: the researchers from the university and the Bio Science Park, the families who commute to The Hague and the people priced out of Amsterdam all want the same few hundred houses from the 1920s and 1930s. Here is what I would tell a friend who has just arrived.

What homes cost

Average sale price, Leiden

€492,047

2025, +3.8% on 2024

Province of Zuid-Holland

€469,137

2025

The Netherlands

€479,527

2025

An average over a small city with big differences between the pre-war neighbourhoods south of the centre and the post-war parts north of the railway. The homes expats ask about most, the family houses in the Professorenwijk and the Burgemeesterswijk, sit well above it. Bidding above the asking price is normal there: in the second quarter of 2026, 71 percent of existing homes in the Netherlands sold above the asking price (NVM). What that means in euros, and how to decide what you bid, is in overbidding in the Netherlands.

A Dutch bank lends at most the market value that an independent valuer puts on the home, so what you bid above it, and the buyer's costs, come from savings. Ask a mortgage adviser who works with international clients for your maximum first; several in Leiden do nothing else, because the university brings a new group of them every year.

A mortgage on a research contract

Many people who come to Leiden arrive on a fixed-term contract: a PhD position, a postdoc, a grant. Dutch lenders differ in how they treat that. Most accept a fixed-term contract with a written statement from your employer that it intends to extend it; some count a PhD salary, some do not; and for non-EU citizens the residence permit matters too. This is not a reason to wait until you have a permanent contract, which in academia may be never. It is a reason to ask an adviser who knows which lender takes your situation, before you fall in love with a house.

The houses: 1920s and 1930s, and what to check

What makes Leiden's southern neighbourhoods so wanted is also what you should look at closely. The houses are mostly from between the wars, often with the original details, and after ninety years the roof, the window frames and the foundation each have a history. Ask for the foundation history of any house built before about 1970; parts of Leiden stand on soft ground, and a house on wooden piles can need expensive repair. Ask whether the house is a protected monument or in a protected townscape, because that limits what you may change, including double glazing and solar panels. And if the house is split into flats, ask for the papers of the owners' association, the VvE, which is legally required to save for maintenance.

Where homes change hands before Funda

In the streets people want most, a good share of the homes never reach Funda. They go to a colleague at the university, to a neighbour, or to the person who wrote to the owner a year earlier. I have written about four of those neighbourhoods; the Professorenwijk, with its streets named after professors and the Zoeterwoudsesingel along the water; the Burgemeesterswijk next to it; the Vogelwijk to the west, where the streets are named after birds; and the Pieterswijk in the old centre, around the Pieterskerk, where the university began.

There are two ways in. The first is to get onto the lists of the selling agents whose boards you see in those streets: email a few of them with who you are, where you want to live, your budget and your adviser's confirmation, and call a week later. The second goes one step further back, to the owner before any agent is involved. How both work is in how to buy an off-market house in the Netherlands.

Writing to owners in Leiden

Few Dutch cities are as used to international residents as Leiden, and an English letter is read without surprise. The owners of the houses you want are often people who came for the university decades ago and never left, so say in the first lines that you came here for work and are staying; that is the doubt a foreign name raises, and one sentence settles it. Keep it personal: who you are, why this street, that you will live there yourself. No price and no deadline. A short Dutch version on the back is a courtesy the older owners notice.

A letter you can send as it is, in English and in Dutch, is in the letter to a Dutch homeowner. With DoorLetter the first letter is free, printed and delivered by PostNL, and the owner can reply anonymously with the code in the letter, also months later.

The steps after a yes

When an owner replies and you agree on the outlines, the route is the ordinary Dutch one, described in buying a house in the Netherlands as an expat: an independent valuer values the home for your mortgage, your adviser arranges the loan, and a notary draws up the written purchase agreement. Only when both of you have signed it is there a sale, and as a private buyer you then have three days to withdraw. A verbal yes binds nobody.