The Aedes benchmark is shifting to the conditiescore, and what that means for your MJOP

It's that time of year when you open the sector report and place your own score next to that of other woningcorporaties (Dutch social housing providers) further down the list. Maintenance and improvement, three sub-scores, a letter alongside them. You roughly know where you stand, you know which conversation you'll have about it with your management team, and you know which question your supervisory board will ask the moment the score is a tenth lower than last year. It's become a ritual, and that's exactly why it's easy to miss that the yardstick itself is shifting.

Because the way that performance field is built is changing. And the part that's changing, technical quality, is exactly the part your maintenance budget rests on. If you're currently building your MJOP (multi-year maintenance plan) for the coming years, you're building it against a standard that will soon measure differently than it does today.

How the performance field is currently structured

Under the current setup, the Maintenance and improvement performance field consists of three sub-scores. Maintenance costs weigh 40 percent, technical housing quality 30 percent, and experienced housing quality the remaining 30 percent. Those maintenance costs aren't assessed on a single year, but measured over a five-year period against a reference value per property type and year of construction. For the Aedes benchmark 2025, that window runs from financial year 2020 up to and including 2024.

That five-year window matters more than it looks. It means an intervention you make this year won't show up fully in your index for several years, and a year in which you deliberately spent less keeps dragging on your average for a long time. In other words, the score is slow moving, and that's exactly why the second component, technical quality, matters.

From energy label to conditiescore

Until now, that technical housing quality has been measured via the EP2 (an energy performance indicator calculated under the NTA8800, the Dutch standard for energy performance assessment). In practice, it mainly measures how energy efficient your property is, not how it's physically holding up. A well insulated property with a dated kitchen, failing window frames and overdue paintwork can still score neatly on that indicator.

That's precisely what's shifting. Aedes is working with woningcorporaties in pilots on a new model for the benchmark from the 2026 edition onwards, in which technical quality no longer comes from the EP2 but from the aggregated conditiescore (condition score) in your dPi (the prospective information report woningcorporaties submit to the sector regulator). That conditiescore says something about the physical state of your portfolio, not about energy performance alone. Functional quality is also being added, measured through the WWS (woningwaarderingsstelsel, the Dutch points-based rent system) points attached to maintenance-sensitive components, and your tenants' experienced housing quality continues to count as well.

Important to keep in mind: Aedes hasn't yet decided if or when this model will definitively replace the current setup. The pilots are running, the direction is clear, the exact start date isn't. So there's no need to panic and overhaul your entire system, but you do know where things are heading.

What that does to your maintenance budget

The core of the shift is this: the benchmark will soon reward what your tenants and your inspectors already see, rather than what your energy label shows. A portfolio that's energetically fine on paper but physically wearing out will see its score fall under the new model, where it still held up under the EP2.

For your MJOP, that means a different weighting than you're used to. If you've prioritised your investments mainly on sustainability in recent years, because that carried your technical score and because policy demanded it, you were implicitly steering by the EP2. Under the conditiescore, the less visible interventions, replacing installations, facade maintenance, resolving condition defects at level 3 or higher, count fully again. Those aren't the line items a subsidy scheme pushes you towards, but they are the ones that will soon determine your score.

The practical consequence is that the quality of your condition survey itself becomes part of your score. An MJOP that leans on outdated or incomplete inspection data will soon deliver not just a poorly substantiated plan, but also an unreliable benchmark position. The woningcorporaties that get ahead of this aren't the ones spending the most, they're the ones getting their condition data in order before that data starts carrying their score.

For the coming edition, you can still put your old score next to the new one, as long as the pilots run. Use that window. Not to rewrite your budget, but to see where your portfolio comes out differently under the conditiescore than under the EP2. That difference, per complex, is exactly the list your MJOP conversation next year will be about.