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

It's Thursday afternoon and your multi-year maintenance budget is on the table at the management team meeting. Your director flips to the bottom line, looks up and asks the question you saw coming: why has this risen for three years running, and how do I know we're not simply overspending? Your own figures are sound. 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 most 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 set it against 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

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

That rise doesn't stand alone. 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 mostly dates from the 1950s to the 1980s. Of every twelve months' rent, 8.3 now goes to maintenance and improvement.

So if your budget has risen by tens of per cent 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 at the management team meeting.

How to compare without mixing apples and oranges

The sector average is a mirror, not a benchmark to meet. If you set your own cost per home against the national figures and draw immediate conclusions, you're almost always comparing apples to oranges. So correct for at least three factors before you attach meaning to a deviation.

First, look at the composition of your stock. A portfolio with a lot of post-war walk-up flats structurally has higher maintenance costs than a stock with a lot of homes built after 2000, regardless of how well you're organised. Next, look at your label mix: those who are already well advanced with sustainability upgrades have the expensive interventions behind them and are now reaping lower planned maintenance costs, while those who still have to start have the peak ahead of them. And finally, look at what you book where. The line between maintenance, home improvement and investment doesn't sit in the same place at every woningcorporatie, and that difference can completely skew a comparison.

In the Aedes benchmark portal, you can therefore filter by reference group, such as woningcorporaties 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 at the management team meeting becomes a three-step argument. First, you position yourself: this is what comparable woningcorporaties spend per home, and here's where we stand. 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 turnover, catching up on installations.

That order changes the conversation. A director who only sees your bottom 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 developments, 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 one sheet of A4 to the next management team meeting with three figures on it: the cost per home for your reference group, your own cost per home, and the three portfolio characteristics that explain the difference. That single sheet shifts the discussion from gut feeling to evidence, which is exactly what sector data is for.