The housing shortage is a decision problem.

The Netherlands has to build a hundred thousand homes a year and averaged seventy thousand between 2019 and 2025. The shortage is 4.6% of the housing stock. Space is not the problem: plan capacity stands at 1.7 million homes, more than half of it still soft, and adding floors to existing buildings alone could deliver around a hundred thousand homes by 2030. Yet topping up currently adds no more than five to six hundred homes a year, and housing associations, which hold two thirds of that potential, are expected to realise just 7.2% of theirs by 2030.

Why? Because every home starts with a decision, and that decision takes too long. From initiative to completion takes ten years on average; the preparatory phase of an area development alone takes seven to eight. Most of that time goes to searching, figuring out and waiting. A greenfield site, a business park turning into a neighbourhood, a soft plan or a complex with room for an extra storey: the information exists, but scattered across dozens of sources. Every developer, housing association and municipality does the same analysis again. By hand. Per location.

It can be done differently. We bring all the data of the Netherlands together in one engine: every address, every building, every parcel, every plan, every permit. You ask a question and get an answer you can verify, because every number traces back to the table beneath it. So you screen the whole country instead of one location: which soft plans have stalled, which parcels are underused, which complexes can take more. From opportunity to go/no-go in days.

We do not speed up procedures. That is up to government, and government is working on it: the national Actieplan Versnelling Woningbouw aims to bring the design and permit process down from eight to four years by 2030, partly through digitalisation. We shorten what comes before it: the searching, the calculating and the substantiating.

We will not solve the housing shortage ourselves. The people who build will. We make sure they decide faster and better, in every municipality of the Netherlands.