"Dutch Only": looking for housing in Amsterdam as an international

“No internationals” or “Dutch only.” Exclusionary language like this, often written at the top of a listing, makes finding housing even harder for international students and young professionals in Amsterdam.

This June, I was looking for housing in Amsterdam myself, and I was suprised about the amount of advertisements in which internationals were explicitly told they were not welcome. As a Dutch woman, I was welcome almost everywhere, except in a small minority of cases were guys were preferred, or older women.

To see if and how much harder it is for internationals in Amsterdam to find housing, I looked at two sources. First, I scraped Kamernet.nl, the biggest room rental website in The Netherlands, for all current listings in Amsterdam. This yielded 262 ads. To determine a bias against internationals, I looked at the preferrend tenant profile (“Verhuurders ideale huurder”) and specifically, at an ideal tenant's spoken languags (“gesproken talen”).

I also manually collected a sample of 100 listings in the biggest housing Facebook group called “Kamer Gezocht/Aangeboden in Amsterdam”, which has more than 130.000 members and roughly 20 posts per day. Unlike Kamernet, where prospective tenants need to pay 34 euros a month to respond to listings, Facebook groups are free. Therefore, they are very popular. Let's first take a look at my Facebook sample.

The stroopwafel represents my total sample of Facebook listings.

At this point, no internationals are excluded yet.

This is what remains of the listings after taking out posts containing "Dutch only" or "No internationals": more than a fourth of the Facebook posts I collected excluded them.

Finally, only slightly less than a third of the listings are written in English (or both English and Dutch).

That is important. People who write their listings in English are probably more open to living with internationals. This chunk might be their realest - or only - shot.

For Kamernet, to my surprise, there seemed to be much more open-mindedness about prospective tenants not speaking any Dutch.

An important distinction between the two platforms is who is posting the listings. On Kamernet, it is mostly landlords marketing their apartments or trying to rent out a spare room. On Facebook, it is roommates looking for other roommates.

In other words: those on Facebook will actually live together with the people they are looking for, whereas the landlords from Kamernet usually will not. That could explain why those on Kamernet are less picky. In a Reddit group about studying in The Netherlands, I came across a similar sentiment.


A Reddit post



While Kamernet, is more inclusive to internationals, it is less inclusive towards men. I noticed that in Amsterdam, there were more listings for women than for men. I was curious to see if this was a trend in other cities too.

In all but two of the biggest cities in the country, Kamernet had more listings for men than women.

Therefore, international men might have an ever harder time than international women.

All in all, internationals are excluded from fewer housing options on Kamernet than on Facebook. Still, they have fewer options on both platforms. Especially international men have relatively fewer chances of getting housing.

In the end, there is a housing shortage for everyone, not just internationals. Not explictly being excluded by a post stating "Dutch only," doesn't mean you'll get a room: supply far exceeds the demand. For the couple hunderd listings in Amsterdam on Kamernet today, there is more than 2000 people searching, according to the website.

In the Reddit group, a user writes. "Time to scout for some good bridges to sleep under. I heard the Bastionweg under the N230 is prime real estate, it's not too far from Science Park and it is remote enough to have less disturbance. Bring a waterproof sleeping bag, it can rain a lot."