Sources & Licenses
When you search HousingMatchers by city, municipality, or neighbourhood, you are really searching the official map of the Netherlands. The boundaries that decide where one neighbourhood ends and the next begins are not drawn by us: they come from open data published by Dutch government organisations such as the Kadaster (the national land registry) and Statistics Netherlands. We are glad to build on that work, and it deserves proper credit — so here it is: every source we use, with its licence.
Administrative Boundaries
Where one municipality ends and the next begins is a matter of official record. For those boundaries we use the Bestuurlijke Gebieden (administrative areas) dataset from the Basisregistratie Kadaster (BRK), a national register kept by the Kadaster. The data is published as open data via PDOK, the Dutch government's open geodata platform.
Source: Kadaster / PDOK — Bestuurlijke Gebieden (BRK)
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Cities and Towns
Search for a city or town and you are searching within the official boundaries of that woonplaats (populated place). These come from the Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen (BAG) — the register that records every address and building in the Netherlands — maintained by the Kadaster and published as open data via PDOK.
Source: Kadaster / PDOK — BAG (woonplaats)
Neighbourhoods and Districts
The reason you can search by neighbourhood here, not just by city, is the Wijk- en Buurtkaart from Statistics Netherlands (CBS). That map divides the whole country into districts (wijk) and neighbourhoods (buurt), each with its own boundary.
Source: CBS — Wijk- en Buurtkaart
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Place Names and Location Hierarchy
Place names, and how places fit together — which neighbourhood belongs to which city, which city to which municipality — come from GeoNames, a worldwide open database of geographical names.
Source: GeoNames
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Nearby Places and Amenities
What is actually around the corner? For shops, schools, transport stops, and other amenities near a property we use OpenStreetMap, the free world map maintained by volunteers. Contains information from OpenStreetMap and the OpenStreetMap Foundation, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL).
Source: OpenStreetMap contributors
Licence: Open Database License 1.0 (ODbL 1.0)
Map Imagery
The maps themselves — the tiles and imagery you see properties on — carry their own attribution. It is shown directly on each map and sits outside the sources listed above.
We use these datasets under their respective licences; where a licence requires attribution, you will find it above. Boundary data is processed and simplified for display, so a boundary shown on HousingMatchers may differ fractionally from the official source geometry.