10 Years Barometer for Public Real Estate in the Netherlands

2007, the Ministry of Housing and Spatial Planning took the initiative to issue the social building blocks: real estate for facilities. This has been the first attempt to deal with social real estate professionally as an asset. In 2008 the professorship of public real estate started with its first Barometer for Social Real Estate. In 2009, I advocated in Real Estate Magazine that research into social real estate is necessary from the perspective of Corporate Real Estate Management (CREM) through new development models and more (PhD) research.
In anticipation of the municipal elections of 2010, research by the research group Municipal Real Estate showed that social real estate was not a matter for the election programs of the political parties. This was a prelude to the funded RAAK subsidy application towards marketed municipal real estate for carrying out practice-oriented research. In 2012, this research led to the externally funded research group Social Real Estate. After that, the Social Real Estate professorship profiled itself in different areas. Extra media publicity has been generated primarily thanks to the attention of minister Stef Blok in 2014, when he received the first copy of the book Barometer Maatschappelijk Vastgoed (Social Real Estate): Corporate Social Responsibility at our annual congress, the round table meeting with State Secretary for Health, Welfare and Sport Martin van Rijn in 2015 and the informal conversation with the Minister of Education, Culture and Science Jet Bussemaker in 2015, as well as the many publications of the lectorate. In the 2016 debate with civil society with the Prime Minister Mark Rutte when handing over the book Barometer Maatschappelijk Vastgoed (Social Real Estate) 2016, a round table meeting in 2017 with Minister of Home Affairs and Kingdom Relations Stef Blok, aldermen and directors Real Estate of Municipalities in The Netherlands, have contributed to social and economic knowledge utilization for future and existing real estate professionals. At the PROVADA 2017 we co-organized ‘Shrink: Emptiness and Space for Innovation and Change’ session, where the Minister of the Home Affairs and Kingdom Relations Ronald Plasterk presented his vision on this subject.