Apartments
The VvE: what you join when you buy an apartment
Updated August 2026
Buy an apartment and you buy two things: your own flat, and a share of the building it sits in. The second comes with membership of the Vereniging van Eigenaars — the owners’ association — which you join automatically on completion. There is no opting out, and there is no such thing as an apartment without one.
The VvE owns the decisions about everything outside your front door: the roof, the facade, the stairwell, the foundations, the shared insurance. Your flat’s condition is your problem. The building’s condition is a collective one, and you are now part of the collective.
What the monthly contribution is for
The bijdrage — you will also see it called servicekosten — covers day-to-day running of the building and, importantly, saving for work that has not happened yet. A healthy association is quietly accumulating money for the roof it will need in eleven years.
A low contribution is therefore not automatically good news. It can mean an efficient building, or it can mean an association that has not been putting anything aside and will meet its next big repair with a one-off levy on every owner. Which of the two it is, is knowable before you buy.
Telling a healthy VvE from a dormant one
Four things separate them, and all four are askable:
- A reserve fund that actually holds money. Setting one aside for future maintenance is a legal requirement, but the balance is what tells you whether it has been taken seriously.
- A long-term maintenance plan (meerjarenonderhoudsplan, MJOP) — a survey of what the building will need and when. Its absence means nobody has costed the future.
- Meetings that happen. An association that has not held its annual meeting in years is a “slapende VvE”, and it is dormant in the ways that cost money, not the restful ones.
- Management. Larger buildings usually appoint a professional administrator; small ones are often run by the owners themselves, which works when the owners are organised and does not when they are not.
On Homawia these sit on the listing page as a VvE checklist — the contribution, whether management is professional, whether a reserve fund exists — for apartments where the agent has stated them. Where a listing says nothing, that is a question rather than an answer.
The paperwork to read
Before completing, ask for the splitsingsakte (which divides the building and defines what you actually own), the huishoudelijk reglement (the house rules — where floor coverings, pets, letting and balconies get decided), the last couple of years of minutes, and the annual accounts. The minutes are the most revealing document in the set: they show you what the building argues about.
Two questions save the most grief later: is there anything major already voted on but not yet paid for, and does the reglement permit what you intend to do — renting the flat out, for instance, or laying a hard floor.