Amsterdam historical housing prices and rents

The Amsterdam historical housing data is a set of long-run house-price and rent series for Amsterdam compiled from the city’s archival records by Piet Eichholtz, Matthijs Korevaar, Marc Francke, Thies Lindenthal and co-authors. The headline product is a repeat-sales house-price index reaching back to the seventeenth century, built from mandatory transaction registrations and, for the nineteenth century, repeat sales on the Herengracht canal. It is the standard free source for multi-century Dutch housing-return work. Used in, for example, Francke (2025), where the Amsterdam house-price index (Bayesian repeat-sales) anchors the long-run price series tested against demographic cohorts.

• Cost: free, no account, no key (Excel files on the authors’ data page).
• Source records: Amsterdam City Archives (Stadsarchief Amsterdam): aldermen transaction registrations (1620 to 1811), nineteenth-century Herengracht repeat sales, the 1805 rental census, and civil registers.
• Coverage: the compiled house-price index runs 1620 to 2019; a separate total-return series covers 1900 to 1979; eighteenth-century rents and yields are a further file.
• Data page: Matthijs Korevaar, https://sites.google.com/view/matthijskorevaar/data

Access

The compiled panels are posted as Excel workbooks on the authors’ data page and download with no login.

# Amsterdam house-price index 1620-2019 (Korevaar, Eichholtz & Francke 2021, ESB);
# 42,591-byte .xlsx, sheets "Sources / Citation" and "Data":
curl -sL "https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id=1d5nOAuyFcD7KhGrgRj3jhlvAgvEfCXt0&export=download" -o amsterdam_index_1620_2019.xlsx

# RFS 2021 headline total-return series (Amsterdam 1900-1979 + Paris 1809-1943);
# 29,096-byte .xlsx, sheets "Sources" and "Headline Series":
curl -sL "https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id=1u-cYs7TiB6-rEhcDqCiGkfXsHdP9mWx1&export=download" -o rfs2021_headline.xlsx

# Full RFS 2021 microdata replication package (large): the plain link returns a
# Google Drive virus-scan interstitial, so add the confirm token:
curl -sL "https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id=1G6X2034aQZCSVprT-7srBEWhMPPtgIxW&export=download&confirm=t" -o rfs2021_replication.zip

The eighteenth-century Amsterdam rents and yields (Korevaar 2023, JFE) are on Mendeley Data: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/db9nz3yhdr/1.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

• The compiled panel is not the raw archive. The fetchable value is the authors’ Excel series. The underlying Stadsarchief Amsterdam records (notarial and transaction registers, in Dutch, largely un-digitized) are a separate, much harder source and are not a clean panel. Do not expect transaction-level microdata from the index file.
• Personal Google Drive hosting, so link rot is real. The files are served from id-based Drive links with no DOI and no versioned permanent URL. One link on the data page (a “Baby Booms” surfdrive link) is already dead (404). Snapshot the file and record the Drive id plus retrieval date.
• Large packages need the Drive confirm token. The microdata zip returns an HTML virus-scan interstitial on the plain link; add &confirm=t and verify you received a zip or xlsx, not an HTML page.
• Several distinct series, do not splice blindly. The 1620-2019 index, the 1900-1979 total-return series, and the eighteenth-century rents/yields are built with different methods and scopes. Pick the file matching your period; joining them into one spliced series needs care about method breaks.
• Workbooks are multi-sheet and partly Dutch. Each file carries a Sources or Citation sheet plus a Data sheet; some labels are in Dutch. Read the Sources sheet for the exact definitions and the citation the authors ask for.
• The index is a level, not transactions. The headline product is a repeat-sales index (Bayesian, Francke method); it is a price level over time, not individual sales. For transaction-level analysis you must go back to the archive.

Reference

Field	Value
Data page	sites.google.com/view/matthijskorevaar/data
House-price index	Amsterdam 1620-2019, .xlsx (Drive id 1d5nO...CXt0)
Total-return series	Amsterdam 1900-1979 + Paris 1809-1943, .xlsx (Drive id 1u-cYs...mWx1)
18th-century rents/yields	Mendeley Data db9nz3yhdr (Korevaar 2023)
Raw source	Amsterdam City Archives (Stadsarchief), separate, un-digitized
Format	Multi-sheet Excel (Sources + Data)
Key required	No

Citation

Cite the specific compiled series and its paper, plus the Drive file (id) and retrieval date: Korevaar, Eichholtz & Francke (2021, ESB) for the 1620-2019 house-price index; Eichholtz, Korevaar, Lindenthal & Tallec (2021), “The Total Return and Risk to Residential Real Estate,” Review of Financial Studies 34(8), 3608-3646, for the 1900-1979 total-return series; Korevaar (2023, Journal of Financial Economics) for the eighteenth-century rents. If you use the underlying records, cite Stadsarchief Amsterdam separately. Record the Drive id and access date, since the files are not versioned.