Renting a dwelling in the Netherlands

"The housing market is blocked" has become a truism in the Netherlands. 

The house-owning market is a rather complicated matter, with tax exemptions for certain income groups, transfer taxes, all kinds of smart mortgage systems with stable or variable interests, and so on. There is constant heated political debate about it, but I couldn't tell you much sensible about it, other than that will not be buying a house for the moment.

What I do know a little bit about from personal experience and people around me, is how renting works in the large Dutch conurbanisations. It is pretty terrible. I live in Utrecht these days. Whenever I tell people I should like to move back to Amsterdam at some point, people always propose to search together. By agreeing to search for a flat to share with ten separate friends at the same time, they hope to increase their chances of finding something sooner. Everybody wants to live Amsterdam, but hardly anybody will be able to find something on a student budget. Here in Utrecht, a friend was looking for close to a year for an two-person appartment. Every time she was just about to go have a look, the place was already let to someone else.

Now that I am just about to move houses, that got me thinking. Surely my personal situation is not statistically squared, but it is fairly exemplary: patchy, messy, temporary. I'm slowly making promotion though. The first flat that I moved into three years ago when I came back to the Netherlands, was without contract and without the landlord knowing that I lived there. The second flat (my current) has no contract, and a landlord grudgingly allowing me to live there, because he makes a handsome amount of money from me. And in my third flat (after this weekend), I will have a temporary sub-tenant contract, and a landlord accepting it. Wow, in five years time I might even have two whole rooms, and an actual contract!

All of this stands in stark contrast to the several student dwellings that I rented in the UK and Spain: five in total, and all with a decent contract and reliable support service from the landlord's side. What the hell is wrong with the Dutch market?