Case Study: Gemeente Hoorn mitigates financial risk in urban housing development with Palisade’s @RISK

Mitigating Risks of Urban Planning with Palisade’s @RISK

Gemeente Hoorn, the municipal authority of Hoorn in the Netherlands, faced growing financial risk in converting agricultural land into residential developments amid volatile macroeconomic conditions and strong competition for developers. To quantify and manage these long-term risks for large investments (around €200m), the city turned to Palisade’s @RISK to model uncertain inputs such as interest, inflation, time and land/pricing scenarios.

Palisade’s @RISK runs Monte Carlo simulations within Excel so Gemeente Hoorn can test price swings (e.g., −20% to +15%), assess the impact of 5–10% cost changes, and determine the financial buffers required for each project. The solution has enabled the city to mitigate development risk, advise the council with data-driven scenarios, make timing decisions (speed up or slow projects), and perform annual recalculations of buffers, becoming core to their urban-planning finance process.

Gemeente Hoorn

Simon Metselaar

Financial Urban Planner