'We Need Someone To Cross That Bridge': International Capital Plays Wait-And-See In The Netherlands' Office Market

The Netherlands’ office market is “on hold,” according to one of the biggest overseas investors in the market. Banks are ready to lend, limited development will support rents, but institutional investors need to get comfortable with bigger deals again. 

While total office investment in 2025 reached €2.1B, according to CBRE, a rise of 19% year-on-year, international investors were largely absent. Even though fundraising is taking place on a pan-European level, Dutch deal flow is still waiting to be unlocked.

“There is sufficient capital in the market and we’re comfortable with our position, but we really need institutional money to start to buy up large portfolios to get everyone going,” said John Schepens, Time Equities’ director of acquisitions and asset management in the Netherlands. 

“We’re all like sheep, and we need someone to cross that bridge.”

Amid this financial landscape, which has been characterised in the last few years by high interest rates, U.S.-headquartered Time Equities has reshaped its portfolio in the Netherlands.

In November 2025, Time Equities celebrated 10 years of investments in the Dutch office market. While the business has operated globally for 54 years as a family office, it has been transitioning towards taking on more outside investment.

As an opportunity-led business, the team initially looked at the Netherlands in 2014 and made its first acquisition of a portfolio of 10 properties in November 2015.

“Directly after the financial crisis, there was no activity here,” Schepens said. “There was huge disruption between pricing and financing, and a lot of distressed opportunities.”

Today, about 85% of Time Equities’ circa $7B portfolio lies in the U.S., comprising a mixture of properties including offices, industrial, retail and residential. The 5% of its assets located in the Netherlands comprises only offices and two shopping centres owned with a joint venture partner. In total, the Dutch portfolio spans more than 2M SF.

The company likes offices due to its yield requirements, Schepens said. The business aims for 10% net cash-on-cash yield, which is almost impossible to make on residential and difficult to reach on industrial and retail, he said.

The business is willing to improve an asset to achieve its desired yield, so it considers opportunities with high vacancy. Its goal is then to stabilise the property through improvements and property management.

Where Time Equities differs from most investors in Dutch real estate is that, up to this point, its entire portfolio has sat outside the four main cities of Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and The Hague. In contrast, institutional investors largely only seek assets in these cities, Schepens said.

One reason for this is the company’s strategy to hold assets for the long term. It underwrites opportunities based on refinancing rather than exit, when the business will take on bank finance and release equity.

Other investors have a three- to five-year hold period then want to exit, an investment style that doesn’t necessarily suit more regional cities, Schepens said. 

“In the top four cities, your return is lower because there's less risk but there’s more liquidity, so more deal certainty that you will get an exit within a certain range,” he said. “In the cities where we invest, it's more opportunity-driven, which is higher yielding, but also, of course, there's more risk if we ever would like to sell the building.”

Schepens attributes low deal flow in major cities in the last few years largely to the macroeconomic environment, which has been characterised by interest rate volatility and value corrections.

This could change in 2024, as interest rates have now stabilised. Savills said the Netherlands’ overall real estate market appears to have bottomed out in 2025. 

A second factor holding back deals in the last few years is the lack of prime, sustainable real estate. While demand from occupiers for high-quality real estate is high, according to CBRE, construction lags. 

In 2024, the amount of new buildings being constructed in the Netherlands was 2.9% lower than in 2023 and is predicted to increase by only 0.5% in 2025 and 2026. Construction costs rose by 3.2% in 2024, according to engineering firm Arcadis, particularly due to rising wage costs.

The supply pipeline is unlikely to ease soon, Schepens said. At the moment, tenants are unable to pay high enough rent to spur investors to navigate environmental, social and corporate governance regulations and develop new real estate.

When Dutch investors invest in offices, Schepens said there’s generally a focus on assets that give a better experience to employees rather than just a place to work, a trend common across Europe. This is Time Equities’ goal with its own brand, SQM Offices.

“We believe an office space should energize people,” he said. “We provide facilities like fitness, lunch and coffee bars, meeting spaces and areas to unwind, combined with access to a network of inspiring locations that support focus, movement and real connection.”

Time Equities is currently looking at several opportunities and is set to make its first acquisition of a 100K SF property in The Hague with a government tenant.

Last year, the business sold a large proportion of its Netherlands portfolio, all properties below 40K SF. While this reduced its number of assets by almost 50%, it represented only 20% of cashflow.

The move was largely a response to the current lending environment, Schepens said. After the business refinanced its entire portfolio with MetLife in 2021, the lending market tightened and the team started to consider how traditional banks might see smaller assets from a risk point of view when it came to refinancing.

“It was difficult to pinpoint a group of investors who would buy the buildings, even though the governance was strong and they had really high debt yield leading to low risks in the deal,” Schepens said. “We considered that selling smaller assets would de-risk our portfolio from a financing perspective.”

Schepens said he is confident the market will get moving soon. A report from Cushman & Wakefield suggests investment delays towards the end of 2025 due to economic uncertainty have led to new pricing levels that are still untested, leaving the market in a “holding pattern.”

“Everyone is waiting for someone to make a move,” Schepens said. “Then, the banks will be more relaxed about financing, which has been a bit restricted due to the situation in the U.S., among other factors.”

Bisnow's free webinar, the Netherlands Commercial Real Estate Outlook 2026, will dive into topics ranging from cash flows and housing returns to retail's resurgence. Find out more and join the webinar.