London. On a nighttime bike ride through the suburbs, I see parks
filled with children playing soccer long after dark. Adam Eades,
president of the European unit of the Chicago Board Options
Exchange (CBOE), had the job of deciding where it would relo-
cate. Amsterdam, he says, beat out Frankfurt, Dublin, Paris, and
Madrid. Eades shuttles weekly from London, where his wife and
child still live, to CBOE’s new EU headquarters in the same Zuidas
building as AM Best. “It is much less frantic here,” he says.
Eades had one more criterion: reasonably priced housing. That
has proved far more elusive. Amsterdam’s property values have shot
up about 36% since the Brexit vote, according to Capital Value,
residential investment advisers in Utrecht. An 800-square-foot
apartment costs about 1,800 euros a month ($2,000) to rent, or
about 500,000 euros ($550,000) to buy. And that’s if you can find
one. Many units are rent-controlled, with 13-year waiting lists. Yeo,
of AM Best, says her company was forced to revise upwards its offers
to new recruits, to account for soaring housing costs.
In a sign of changing times, London home prices have sunk, while
Amsterdam’s have hit bubble-risk territory, according to a recent
UBS report. Eeg De Veer, housing manager for relocation experts
Expat Help, says his company has helped resettle more than 700
EMA staffers. Many are keeping their London homes while renting
in Amsterdam, waiting for the British pound to recover before they
commit to selling and reinvesting. “Everyone is in a vacuum,” De
Veer says, “waiting to see what will happen with Brexit.”
A SHORT BUS RIDE FROM ZUIDAS, office towers give way to low-
rise warehouses along a blustery channel feeding into the
North Sea: the port of Amsterdam. From here, centuries ago,
Dutch merchants turned the Netherlands into a commercial giant,
helping to open the Silk Road and virtually invent global trade.
Starbucks’ mammoth warehouses are here,
and the port is the world’s biggest processor
of cocoa beans; a strong smell of chocolate
wafted over the terminal on the day I visited.
Port authorities in Amsterdam and larger,
busier Rotterdam have spent months prepar-
ing for Brexit, fearing total upheaval. If the
U.K. leaves the union, all British imports and
exports will require customs declarations—a
regime that has not existed for 30 years. The
Netherlands estimates Brexit could reduce its
GDP by up to 1.2%, or about 10 billion euros
annually, by 2030. (Britain, by most estimates,
will suffer much greater damage.)
“Exporters and importers will have
increased costs for sure,” says Michael van
Toledo, general manager of TMA Logistics.
TMA oversees six container-ship crossings per
week between Britain and the Netherlands. The
vessels headed to Britain are laden with food
and other goods. (The Netherlands sends vast
quantities of fish, cut potatoes, and mayon-
naise, basics for fish-and-chips meals; Britain
produces little of its own.) Those arriving
in Amsterdam? Most are filled with trash—
literally. Some of Londoners’ household waste,
van Toledo explains, is incinerated and turned
into electricity for 40,000 Amsterdam homes.
It’s intriguing to imagine London’s garbage
lighting the homes of former residents whose
old lives, like the trash, have gone up in smoke.
Now, as the Brexit wrangling continues, the
newcomers are considering a future they could
not have predicted before: becoming Dutch.
Geoffroy Vander Linden, head of Market-
Axess’s Netherlands business, is now living in
Amsterdam after 12 years in London. He was
expecting his first child—a baby boy to be born
in Holland—as Fortune went to press. His
colleague, Rhian Ravenscroft, says her toddler,
Seren, is now fluent in Dutch: “She even com-
peted in her first bike race!” Rhian’s husband,
Toan, 35, will soon move from London to be
management partner of M&C Saatchi Sports
and Entertainment, which will open its new
EU headquarters in Amsterdam. It is not clear
the couple will ever return to London. However
Brexit plays out, Rhian says, “this is a lovely
place to raise a family.”SOFT LANDING Angela Yeo of AM Best in the lobby
café of Amsterdam’s NoMA House, an office building
that’s now a hub for what Yeo calls “Brexit refugees.”