Buying a house in Scharn (Maastricht): how to reach the owners

Scharn is one of the Maastricht neighbourhoods outside the ring roads where people buy a house with a garden and then stay. You have the city within cycling distance and the Heuvelland around the corner, and you do not give that up easily. If something does come free, the street usually knows first, and the house goes to a neighbour or to someone who had once let the owner know that he wanted to live here.

For centuries Scharn was a hamlet at a crossroads east of the city; the oldest mention is from 1145, and most of it belonged to the municipality of Heer until 1970. The old core lies around the Wethouder van Caldenborghlaan and the Burgemeester Cortenstraat, where there are still courtyard farms from the eighteenth century. Along the Scharnerweg Scharn grew onto the city in the first half of the twentieth century, and many of those buildings are now listed monuments. After the war city architect Frans Dingemans drew an expansion plan with the Antonius van Paduakerk in the middle, and the terraced and semi-detached houses came. An older house on the Scharnerweg or a semi-detached house with a deep garden comes free least.

If I were searching here, I would take a stretch of the Scharnerweg and the streets around the old core, the Burgemeester Cortenstraat for instance, and write to the residents of the houses that suit me. Briefly: who I am, why Scharn, and that I am going to live there myself. Anyone selling here wants to know to whom; a letter with a name and a story answers that question before it has been asked.

The average sale price in Maastricht per year since 1995

This page in Dutch: Huis kopen in Scharn.