Defending your multi-year maintenance budget in the management team: using sector data as a mirror

It's Thursday afternoon and your multi-year maintenance budget is on the table in the management team meeting. Your director flips to the total line, looks up and asks the question you saw coming: why has this risen for three years running now, and how do I know we're not simply overspending? Your own figures are correct. Your condition surveys are in order, your scenarios calculated. But you have no answer to that one question from your own records, because they only cover your own portfolio.

That's the structural problem with every maintenance budget: within your own organisation, the best you can do is compare complexes against each other. Whether your cost increase is normal, too low or out of step only becomes clear once you put it next to the rest of the sector. That's exactly what the Aedes benchmark is for, and the latest edition gives you more ammunition than ever.

What the sector spends on maintenance and sustainability upgrades

The Aedes benchmark 2025, published in November 2025 covering financial year 2024, shows that woningcorporaties (Dutch social housing associations) together spent 12.1 billion euros on maintenance, improvement and sustainability upgrades. That's 1.5 billion more than the year before. The number of homes that received more than 10,000 euros of investment rose from 153,110 to 192,790, and more than a million housing association homes now have an A energy label or better.

That rise doesn't stand on its own. According to an analysis by Aedes, spending on maintenance and improvement grew from 8.4 billion in 2021 to 12.1 billion in 2024, a 41 per cent increase in three years. Almost half of that is down to inflation and price rises in the construction and maintenance sector, the rest to deliberate choices: more sustainability upgrades and quality improvements in a housing stock that largely dates from the 1950s to the 1980s. Out of every twelve months' rent, 8.3 now goes towards maintenance and improvement.

If your budget has risen by tens of percentage points in recent years, you're not the exception. You're in the middle of a sector-wide movement. That's the first line of your defence in the management team meeting.

How to compare without mixing apples and oranges

The sector average is a mirror, not a standard. Anyone who puts their own cost per home next to the national figures and draws immediate conclusions is almost always comparing apples to oranges. So correct for at least three factors before you attach meaning to a deviation.

First, look at the make-up of your housing stock. A portfolio with a lot of post-war walk-up flats structurally has higher maintenance costs than a stock with plenty of homes built after 2000, regardless of how well you're organised. Then look at your label mix: whoever is already far along with sustainability upgrades has the expensive interventions behind them and is now reaping lower planned maintenance costs, whoever still has to start has the peak still ahead of them. And finally, look at what you book where. The line between maintenance, home improvement and investment isn't drawn in the same place at every housing association, and that difference can completely skew a comparison.

In the Aedes benchmark portal, you can therefore filter by reference groups, such as housing associations of a similar size. Use that group as your mirror, not the national total. A deviation from your reference group tells you something, a deviation from the sector average often tells you little.

From mirror to a defensible multi-year maintenance budget

With those corrections in hand, your story in the management team becomes a three-step argument. First, you position yourself: comparable housing associations spend this per home, here's where we sit. Then you explain the difference using portfolio characteristics: our stock is older, our label mix is behind or ahead. And only then do you point out which part of your budget is a policy choice: sustainability upgrades brought forward, a higher quality standard at re-letting, catching up on installations.

That order changes the conversation. A director who only sees your total line can ask just one question: can this be done more cheaply? A director who sees that the sector became 41 per cent more expensive in three years, that almost half of that is price development, and that your deviation from the reference group is explainable, asks a better question: are we choosing the right pace?

In practice, this means you don't need to rebuild your entire budget. Take a single sheet of paper to the next management team meeting with three figures on it: the cost per home of your reference group, your own cost per home, and the three portfolio characteristics that explain the difference. That one sheet changes the discussion from gut feeling to substantiation, and that's exactly what sector data is for.