What if you bought Amsterdam apartment in 1990?
Real estate · House. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play6.2× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Amsterdam apartment at the start of 1990 would be worth about $6,200 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Amsterdam is a small, tightly regulated city that many people want to live in, and its apartment prices reflect that scarcity. Values roughly doubled during the 1990s as Dutch mortgage lending loosened and generous tax deductibility of mortgage interest encouraged large loans. Growth slowed in the 2000s, and after the financial crisis Dutch house prices fell for several years, a painful episode in a country with some of the highest household mortgage debt in Europe. From 2013 the government began gradually limiting mortgage interest relief.
The recovery from 2014 was fierce. Ultra-low interest rates from the European Central Bank, a booming tech and expat economy, tourism, investors buying to let, and chronic under-building pushed prices up by more than half within a few years. Rising rates caused a modest dip in 2022-2023, after which prices resumed rising. Recent rules, including caps on rents for mid-market housing and higher taxes on second homes, pushed many private landlords to sell, shifting supply from renters to owners. Over the period, values rose roughly sixfold in this series.
The lesson: Structural scarcity plus cheap credit can lift prices for decades, but tax and rental rules can change an investor's return without touching the building.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $100 | $6,200 | $19,429 | 6.2× |
| 1995 | $120 | $5,167 | $14,783 | 5.2× |
| 2000 | $200 | $3,100 | $4,626 | 3.1× |
| 2003 | $220 | $2,818 | $7,727 | 2.8× |
| 2005 | $230 | $2,696 | $5,763 | 2.7× |
| 2007 | $260 | $2,385 | $4,789 | 2.4× |
| 2008 | $280 | $2,214 | $4,626 | 2.2× |
| 2010 | $250 | $2,480 | $6,071 | 2.5× |
| 2012 | $240 | $2,583 | $5,312 | 2.6× |
| 2015 | $250 | $2,480 | $3,301 | 2.5× |
| 2018 | $380 | $1,632 | $2,519 | 1.6× |
| 2020 | $460 | $1,348 | $2,092 | 1.3× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $6,200. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Amsterdam apartment is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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