As the COVID-19 pandemic drags on into 2021, I think it’s fair to say that we are all desperate for it to end. We urgently need to return to some sort of normality, for our own collective mental health, if nothing else.

Our financial health needs addressing, too. Economies are being ravaged across Europe and this has been reflected in the amount of real estate deals that took place in 2020. According to RCA’s European Capital Trends Q3 2020 report, the total European real estate deal volume in the third quarter of 2020 fell 43 percent compared with the same quarter of 2019, to €44 billion. This means that transaction volume in the first nine months of 2020 was down 19 percent to €172 billion.

Nevertheless, there has been some encouraging news from here in the Netherlands. Savills recently estimated that investment into Dutch real estate only declined by 10 percent in 2020 compared to the five-year average. One of the reasons for this performance, which