How to find the owner of a Dutch property: the Kadaster, what it costs, and what you may do with it

I am Jiri, an estate agent in Maastricht. When someone asks me how to find out who owns a house, I first ask a question back: do you want to know, or do you want to reach the owner? For the second you usually do not need the name. For the first there is the Kadaster, the Dutch land registry, and it is simpler and cheaper than most people think, also for someone who has just arrived and has no Dutch.

What the Kadaster is and why it is public

The Kadaster is the register in which, for every piece of land and every building in the Netherlands, it says who the owner is, how large the parcel is and which rights rest on it. That register is public, and with reason: whoever buys a house must be able to check that the seller really owns it, and whoever lends money with a house as security must be able to see whether there is already a mortgage on it. That openness applies to everyone.

It means that you, as a private person and whatever your nationality, can request the owner of an address without having to give a reason. You do not need to be an agent or a notary, and you do not need a Dutch citizen service number to order.

How to order ownership information

Go to kadaster.nl and look for the product that for private customers is called eigendomsinformatie, ownership information. You fill in the address, the site finds the matching parcel, you pay online and receive a PDF by email, usually within minutes. It costs a few euros per address. At the counter it is considerably more expensive, but you do not need that for this. The site is in Dutch; the form asks only for the postcode and house number, and a browser translation gets you through the rest.

A free route through an official source does not exist. What you can look at for free is the cadastral map with the parcel boundaries, useful to see whether the garden and the garage belong to the same parcel. A name on the doorbell or in a neighbourhood app is not a source: that can be a tenant, or someone who has not lived there for years.

What is in it

The document gives the cadastral designation (municipality, section and number), the area of the parcel and the address. Below that are the owner or owners; for a private person with name and the address where he lives according to the register. You also see how and when the ownership was acquired, for instance by purchase in a certain year, and in many cases the price that was in the deed at the time. That old price says little about today's value.

What is not in it: a telephone number, an email address or anything about the owner's plans. The mortgage is not included as standard either; that is a separate product. So you get facts about the ownership, not contact details, and certainly no answer to the question whether someone wants to sell.

If the owner is not the person who lives there

Sometimes the owner is a company (a bv), a foundation or a housing corporation. Then the house is rented, and the person who takes your letter out of the letterbox cannot decide anything about it. In that case the extract is really useful: you write to the owner at the address in the register, and you can say honestly in the letter that you know the property is rented and that you want to live there only once it becomes free. A landlord who was already thinking of selling likes to hear from a buyer who does not pay an investor's price.

A private owner can also live elsewhere. Think of children who are keeping the house of a parent who has died, or someone who is working abroad for a while. The owner's address in the register is then the address your letter has to go to.

Two terms you may come across that are no reason for panic. Erfpacht, ground lease, means the land belongs to someone else, often the municipality, and that you buy the right to live there against a yearly rent or a sum paid in advance; in Amsterdam it is entirely normal and the extract mentions it. An appartementsrecht, apartment right, means you buy part of a building with a share in the whole, and then there is an owners' association, the VvE. That association is registered with its board at the Chamber of Commerce, but its list of members is not public. So the owner of one apartment you still find through the Kadaster, not through the association.

What you may do with the data, and what not

The data is public, but public does not mean free for all. The European privacy law, the GDPR (in Dutch the AVG), is aimed at the systematic processing of personal data: building lists, sharing files, approaching people commercially again and again. A private person who sends one personal letter to the owner of a house he wants to live in himself does none of that. That is ordinary post, and it is allowed.

What you do not do is put the names and addresses of a whole district in a spreadsheet and write to them year after year, or pass that list to someone else. And anyone who lets you know they want no post, you leave alone. I am an agent and not a lawyer, so anyone planning something larger asks someone who is. For the ordinary case, one house and one letter, that is not needed.

Why "to the resident(s) of" is usually enough

Now the honest advice. For a first letter I recommend not using the name, even if you have it. An envelope to "de bewoner(s) van Kerkstraat 12", the resident(s) of Kerkstraat 12, arrives at exactly the same address as an envelope with the name on it. The difference is in how it is read. A letter with your full name on it, from someone you have never met, makes many people ask how that person got the name. That is not a good start to a conversation that has to be about trust, and for a newcomer with a foreign name that question is asked a little louder.

If a tenant lives there, the letter arrives too: tenants often pass such a letter on to the landlord, especially when it says you know the house may be rented. And the owner who lives there himself knows the letter is for him without you having looked him up. In my experience the name on the envelope makes no difference to the reply, and the content of the letter makes all the difference. What that content looks like is in the letter to a Dutch homeowner, in English and in Dutch. Through DoorLetter the first letter goes out free, printed and delivered by PostNL, and every letter carries a code with which the owner can reply to you anonymously; for that you need no name, only the address. DoorLetter does not look up owners' names for you, and addresses the letter to the resident(s) on purpose.

When the name is useful

There are three situations in which I do order the extract. The first is the conversation. When an owner replies and you start talking, you want to know that you are talking to the owner and not to a tenant or a grown-up child living at home, and whether there are several owners who have to agree. You can simply ask, but it is pleasant to know before you sit down.

The second is the rented or empty house. A property that has been dark for months, or an address where the residents keep changing: there "to the residents" reaches nobody who decides, and then the owner in the register is the only way in. The third is the preparation for the formal part. When you have agreed, you want to be sure for the valuer and the notary which parcel it is exactly and whether there is a ground lease on it. At that moment those few euros are amply worth it.

Whoever wants to get going with this starts not at the Kadaster but in the street. How to choose the addresses, what to write and what to do when nothing comes for months is in how to buy an off-market house in the Netherlands. And whoever wonders what else is different about buying here reads buying a house in the Netherlands as an expat first.