Regulation designed to cap rents in some parts of the European living market has “gone too far” and needs to be reined back in order to allow private capital to help solve the continent’s growing housing crisis.

Jeremy Eddy, European head of living capital markets, and Frank Verwoerd, head of research, the Netherlands, at CBRE, have told Institutional Real Estate Europe that a number of European nations could be exacerbating the continent’s shortage of housing supply with excessive rental cap rules. The wide variety of regulation in Europe is also warding off international investors from allocating capital into the multifamily sector and is instead pushing investors to look more broadly at the living sector, especially relatively unregulated segments such as student housing co-living and senior living.

“There is now great uncertainty as to how rent regulation will evolve in the future in some European countries,” says Verwoerd. “This has made it really tr