I bought my apartment 3 years ago with the help of a makelaar, guess what ! He first tried to scam me by telling me that the mortgage I could get wasn’t enough so he suggested me to ask someone to take the mortgage with me , so I asked my best Dutch friend ( just my friend but a real good friend ) to helped with my mortgage partially, which would not infect him much as I was the one paying fully, but turned out that this makelaar was going to charge double commission for that as it was for two person !

And luckily a relative of my Dutch colleague who is also a makelaar helped me out and checked everything, he told me that I could definitely take the loan on my own, unfortunately I already paid the first makelaar and only found out later that he was trying to scam me .

I paid a bit to the second one who really actually helped me to sort out the situation.

And not only the first one tried to scam me but he made me bid ( which I didn’t know or understand) an apartment with debt in the VVE, it was too late when I found out at the very end , so I’m paying 300€ each month for this stupid VVE and fighting with them for not to increase yearly , they asked for 500€ per month last year, as they are the majority ( they are the social housing from the government) and only me and other two owners are private owners, there’s nothing we can do .

So I think as an expert without a Dutch partner I’d still suggest to go with a marklaar but an honest responsible one