The Dutch estate agency market in figures (2026)

By our count, the Netherlands has 4,386 estate agency organisations with 5,329 branches between them. Of those, 88.2% have one branch and 11.9% have two or more. Of the 4,025 websites analysed, 53.2% run recognisable agency software, 44.4% offer a valuation and 25.2% offer mortgages. All figures come from our own measurement of 23 August 2026 and are lower bounds.

How the market is structured

The Dutch estate agency market consists mainly of single-office agencies. We collected organisations from the member lists and directories of the NVM (the largest Dutch association of estate agents), VBO, VastgoedPro, makelaars-gids and Funda (the dominant Dutch property portal), and counted branches by postcode and house number.

On average, an organisation has 1.22 branches. Businesses operating under two domains were merged when they shared at least two addresses, or one address and a brand name. Franchisees with their own domain were kept separate, because an independent owner makes the decisions there.

The multi-branch agency is therefore a small group, roughly one in eight organisations. It is also the group in which the question "which branch performs better, and why" matters most.

How many agencies use agency software

53.2% of the websites analysed show recognisable agency software. That is unusually high. Among kitchen and bathroom retailers, which we researched in the same way, we found no sector-specific software at all.

The software packages are owned by the trade associations. Realworks has been 100% owned by the NVM since 2015 and cites 2,550 agencies and 19,000 daily users on its own CRM page. Kolibri is owned by Vastgoed Nederland, the association formed on 1 January 2025 by the merger of VBO and VastgoedPro.

The remaining 46.8% is not an empty field. Software that runs only behind a login leaves no trace on the homepage. The real share is therefore higher than what we can see.

The website itself is also easy to identify: almost half of the sites run on WordPress. That determines how you place a form or widget: through a plug-in or site by site.

Visible lead systems increase with size

The more branches, the more often an agency has a visible lead system on its website. This table comes from the same measurement, with websites grouped by organisation in our market size model. By lead system we mean software that captures or follows up leads, such as a valuation-check widget with a follow-up campaign.

The jump comes at around three to four branches. That is the point at which an agency becomes too large to track leads by hand, and is often still too small for its own marketer. The lower bound applies here too: a system that runs only in the back office is invisible to us.

Which services estate agents offer online

Almost half of estate agents offer a valuation on their website. Mortgages and new-build each appear at about a quarter.

That makes the valuation the most widely offered lead source in the sector. A valuation, however, is orientation, not yet a sales instruction. Between the request and a signed sales instruction there can be anything from weeks to more than a year, which makes measurement difficult. How to approach that is covered in which lead source wins the most sales instructions.

How estate agents organise mortgages

Most estate agents who offer mortgages do so through an in-house service. In our measurement:

We also found 59 mortgage firms that estate agents link to from their site. Of those, 57 do not appear as estate agents in our data. So there is a steady flow of clients between estate agents and advisers, and with an external adviser that flow leaves the agency with every referral. How to track what those referrals deliver is covered in referring leads to your mortgage adviser.

What this means for a multi-branch agency

A multi-branch agency belongs to the small group that runs the most software. That creates a concrete risk: the more systems, the more places a lead comes in, and the harder it becomes to see which source produced which sales instruction.

Three questions these figures let you put to your own agency:

• Do you know, per branch, how many valuation requests came in and how many of them became a sales instruction?
• If you refer mortgage clients, do you know what happened to those clients and what you received in return?
• Is the source of a lead still on record at the moment the sales instruction is signed?

If you are comparing software to answer those questions, the comparison of lead software for estate agents helps you sort the types of vendor. What the fragmentation means for anyone who wants to grow is covered in consolidation among Dutch estate agencies.

How we measured this

All figures in this article come from our own measurement on 23 August 2026, except the numbers Realworks cites itself. We collected 4,386 organisations with 5,329 branches from NVM, VBO, VastgoedPro, makelaars-gids and Funda, and analysed 4,025 websites.

For each website we read the public homepage and the Tag Manager containers. The latter is necessary because a large share of sites load scripts through Tag Manager; without those containers you miss almost half of the widgets.

Every percentage is a lower bound. We only see what a website shows. Software that runs in the back office or behind a login stays invisible, even if the agency uses it every day. "No software found" therefore means "no software visible on the website", not "no software".

The detections were spot-checked during the research. Where one vendor's name appeared within another's, or where one business was listed under two domains, this was corrected before we counted.

KeyVue uses this measurement to understand for which agencies conversion by source, branch and agent makes the difference. What that means in practice is on the page for estate agents.

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