Property investors are not "hoarding" houses. They buy them and then rent them out, thus increasing the supply. It is actually better for students this way: an investor that does not live in their property can rent out it whole. If a house can fit 5 people that means a living space for 5 students. If the house gets bought by a family, that family moves in, so 3 out of 5 spots are now occupied, leaving only 2 available for rent. I don't know, maybe that's the hidden goal of this policy: push the students out, and bring in more families.

> They buy them and then rent out, thus increasing the supply.

That doesn't increase supply. I'm really not sure how middlemen skimming money could increase supply since that should push the supply curve to the left.

> If the house gets bought by a family, that family moves in, so 3 out of 5 spots are now occupied, leaving only 2 available for rent.

And the family moved in from somewhere else, leaving you with three spots in that some other place plus two spots in the new place, so you have 5 places for students regardless. Not sure why you think this changes something.

The optimal solution is obviously to fix the dorm system. It's well organized, cheap, and space efficient - at least in my country, at about half the price of renting your own place. Surely my backwards country is not more capable than the Dutch in this respect.

> And the family moved in from somewhere else, leaving you with three spots in that some other place plus two spots in the new place, so you have 5 places for students regardless. Not sure why you think this changes something.

Because that family might have moved from out of town, and students can't move to their old place that is too far from the university?

EDIT: I'm not sure that building more dorms is a good idea. My experience (although from totally different country) is that dorm rooms are the worst possible environment for learning. During my time in college there was a clear division: those who prioritized studying lived in the quiet rental apartments, those who prioritized socializing lived in the dorms :)

> During my time in college there was a clear division: those who prioritized studying lived in the quiet rental apartments, those who prioritized socializing lived in the dorms :)

And I wonder who ended up better off :).

The longer I live, the more I realize that I made a mistake during my university years. I focused on learning where I should've been partying - because as it turns out, knowledge is the easy part. The hard part - and the important part - is building a network of friends and connections, which happens at parties, not in quiet rental apartments.

That's not a problem specifically for students, though. That's a problem for everyone when X people need to move to a city where there's Y<X capacity of housing.

> an investor that does not live in their property can rent out it whole

There's a flip side to this. An investor that does not live in their property doesn't care about the property as a place to live. So...

> If a house can fit 5 people that means a living space for 5 students.

But what actually happens these days is the house gets renovated to turn those 5 living spaces into 8 or 10. Students don't have any leverage on the market, so investors will densify houses over time, until they health and safety limits, and then some (the rents, of course, don't drop proportionally). Not enough students anymore? Fortunately there's AirBnB now. What about people who actually want to settle in the area? Nah, they're too needy, literally the least efficient bunch to extract money from.

Elsewhere in the thread, some people say that the problem is with people who want to settle in expensive, wealthy cities. But perhaps the main reason those cities are expensive is because of property investment? That is, all those high salaries cancel out with high rents. Get rid of high rents, salaries may drop, but so do costs of living, and the whole market settles at a more approachable and sustainable level.

I know a girl who bought a house with a mortgage backed by her government-student-grant somewhere around 2006 iirc.

Additionally, If prices weren't so high there would be more students buying houses with their parents money.

None of that is to say I understand the market, it's history or future. But your take seems to be based on dogma and an oversimplified supply and demand model.