About us
Ask someone about their estate and you won't be shown the annual accounts.
You hear about the avenue their great-grandfather planted, and about the tenant farmer who has been there for forty years. Every owner and manager we speak to is completely bound to their estate. We do not talk over that — that bond is the engine underneath everything. Without it, there would long since have been nothing left to talk about.
But feeling alone does not get you there. Less and less.
What estates are facing.
Climate change. Nitrogen. A shifting view of the way we farm. Maintenance costs of listed buildings and historic grounds rising faster than what the estate brings in. And sooner or later the handover to the next generation, with all the questions about division and capacity that come with it.
These are not things you solve with rose-tinted glasses. They call for overview: what does this estate really cost, what does it bring in, how many hours of work are in it, which obligations are still running, and what is going to happen over the next twenty years.
Feeling and business belong together here and are inseparable. Whoever does not have the business side in order will, in time, lose precisely what they hold dear. Whoever only looks at the figures is left with a property portfolio.
Who we are
We see that passion and feel it ourselves. And we help on the other, business side.
De Nieuwe Rentmeesters is built by two brothers, Steven and Reinoud ten Cate, from an estate we manage ourselves, together with Hugo van den Wall Bake, steward.
What we see.
The problem is not that there is too little data. It is there. It is just spread so widely across binders, mailboxes, loose spreadsheets and the heads of people who have been walking around for thirty years, that you cannot make a sum of it. And without a sum, no conversation.
Ask what maintaining the listed buildings will cost over the next ten years, and the answer is an estimate. Ask what the estate gives the region in nature, walking trails, housing and jobs, and there is no answer at all — while everyone knows it is considerable.
That gap explains a lot. Why a conversation with a municipality about a single house takes years. Why a fund struggles to judge what it is financing. Why families get stuck among themselves over what can and cannot be done. There is no shared basis of facts, so opinions are negotiated instead.
What we are building.
One system for the core processes of an estate: map and parcels, master data, document archive, contracts and agricultural leases, reports and work orders, tasks and calendar, subsidies and funds, and what is going on around the estate in terms of permits. With an assistant, Rens, who reads your documents and warns you in time.
That is the day-to-day side: less hassle, nothing slipping through. The real goal lies behind it. Every time a contract is recorded or a work order is completed, the picture of what this estate is grows. That happens by itself, as a by-product of simply doing your work — you do not have to compile a report afterwards.
From one estate to all estates.
One estate with its figures in order can substantiate its own case. A hundred estates doing so change the conversation itself.
Then it is no longer an opinion that maintaining historic grounds structurally does not pay — then it can be counted. Then no one has to assume that estates contribute to biodiversity and heritage without a sound business model underneath. Then it is there, with sources attached.
We believe estates should be given room to develop: for housing, for nature, for recreation, for the economy of the area. Tradition is not the argument for that. The argument is that otherwise the sum does not add up and the estate slowly crumbles.
A position like that has to be substantiated. That is what we are building the tools for.
How we work
Better a gap than an assumption.
If something is not in the source, we do not make it up. What Rens takes from a document is always a proposal: you see it, you approve it. It says “Unknown” where something is unknown — never a zero and never a guess.
That is a hard requirement. Figures you take to a province or a fund have to be right down to the source. Otherwise it works once, and never again.
Your data stays yours. What you share with other estates is up to you.
So that it carries on well.
See it on your own estate.
In a 30-minute demo we put one of your estates into the platform: the parcels, two contracts and the first alerts.