Buying a house in Maastricht as an expat: from the agent who sells there

I am Jiri, an estate agent in Maastricht, and this is the one city guide I can write from my own kitchen table. I sell houses here, I know which streets change hands without a board in the window, and I sit across from the international staff of the university and the hospital who are trying to buy one. Here is what I would tell a friend who has just moved here.

What homes cost

Average sale price, Maastricht

€413,671

2025, +4.7% on 2024

Province of Limburg

€381,845

2025

The Netherlands

€479,527

2025

Compared with the Randstad cities, Maastricht is affordable, and that is the first thing newcomers notice. The second thing, a few months later, is that the parts of the city they actually want to live in are not: the old centre, Wyck, the Jekerkwartier, Sint Pieter and the villa streets of Scharn and Biesland are small, their residents stay for decades, and a house there is contested by the same people as everywhere else. Bidding above the asking price happens here too, less often and less steeply than in Utrecht; the public figures per quarter and per province are in overbidding in the Netherlands, and the province of Limburg is near the bottom of that list.

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.

Buying across a border

Maastricht has Belgium on three sides and Germany half an hour away, and many of my international clients ask whether they should buy in Lanaken or Aachen instead. Sometimes they should; but it is a different country, with a different purchase procedure, different taxes and a different mortgage market, and your Dutch employer and your Dutch adviser know the Dutch side best. If you buy in the Netherlands, everything in buying a house in the Netherlands as an expat applies: a written purchase agreement, three days to withdraw, the buyer's costs from savings. One thing is local: the city has a large share of apartments in old buildings, and every one comes with an owners' association, the VvE, whose papers you read before you bid.

Old houses, marl and the river

Maastricht is one of the oldest cities in the country, and in the centre, Wyck and the Jekerkwartier you buy history: houses from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often protected monuments. A monument limits what you may change, and the municipality has a say in windows, roofs and facades; ask before you plan anything. Along the Jeker and the Maas, ask about damp and about the cellar. And in the south of the city, towards Sint Pieter, the ground is marl, which has been quarried for centuries; a seller must tell you what he knows about the ground under a property, and a surveyor who knows Maastricht knows where to look.

Where homes change hands before Funda

In the streets I sell in most, a good share of homes never reach Funda. The owner tells a neighbour, calls an agent he knows, or takes a letter out of a drawer. I have written about five of those neighbourhoods; Wyck, on the east bank between the station and the river, where the university's international staff want to live; the Jekerkwartier, the quiet old quarter along the Jeker south of the centre; Sint Pieter, the village on the hill between the city and the Belgian border; and the villa neighbourhoods of Scharn and Biesland, where families with children look first.

There are two ways in. The first is to get onto the lists of the selling agents whose boards you see in those streets, mine included: 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 Maastricht

Maastricht owners are used to international neighbours, with the university and its international institutes, and an English letter is read in the centre and Wyck without surprise. In Scharn, Biesland and Sint Pieter, where many owners have lived for forty years, I would send the Dutch version, with the English on the back if you want. What I see binned here, as everywhere, is anything that looks like an investor's mailing: Maastricht has had plenty of those. So keep it personal: who you are, why this house, that you came here for work and are staying, and that you will live there yourself. No price and no deadline.

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. I built it because at almost every sale I handled here, the owners told me about letters from buyers that were lost by the time the house really came up for sale.

The steps after a yes

When an owner replies and you agree on the outlines, the route is the ordinary Dutch one: 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. And if the owner wants an agent at his side for the sale, that is normal and fine; a letter is the step before the ordinary work, not a way around it.