People readily secure the detached house on the outskirts, and consider the flat in the centre to be protected by its height and its neighbours. In Kortrijk, this reasoning is wrong: 224 residential burglaries were recorded in 2025, or 4.3 per week, in a city where multi-unit housing takes up a growing share of the centre.
What the Kortrijk series really says
Police crime statistics give the recorded incidents municipality by municipality. For Kortrijk, reading them takes a little method, because the series does not fall in a straight line.
From 285 incidents in 2019, the municipality fell to 229 in 2020, then to 206 in 2021 — a floor owed entirely to successive lockdowns and constantly occupied homes. The return to normal was immediate: 285 in 2022, exactly the pre-crisis level. Since then, the decline has been steady but slow: 270 in 2023, 259 in 2024, 224 in 2025. Over six years, the fall reaches 21.4%; over the last year alone, 13.5%.
Two older reference points shed light on this trajectory. In 2000, Kortrijk recorded 296 residential burglaries; in 2015, the peak of the series, 366. The 2025 level is therefore clearly lower than ten years ago, but it remains very real: more than four families a week find their home broken into. Of the 300 burglaries in buildings recorded in 2025, 75% were in homes: despite an active shopping centre, it is housing that concentrates the risk.
Why a flat in Kortrijk is not a safe haven
Kortrijk combines two urban forms: a dense centre, where blocks of flats and town houses stand side by side, and a suburban ring of gardens, conservatories and rear access points. Security advice has been built around the latter; the former calls for a different logic.
In a block of flats, a break-in does not start at your front door: it starts in the entrance hall. A typical Kortrijk building has many entry points — main door, garage access, service door on the courtyard side, bicycle storage room, shared cellar — each opened dozens of times a day by people who do not all know each other. The ‘social filtering’ attributed to shared buildings works poorly as soon as a building has more than a handful of flats.
Three weaknesses come up again and again. The first is the intercom: you buzz in an announced delivery driver without seeing them, and the intruder is then inside the perimeter, out of sight of the street, with all the time they need. The second is the flat's front door, often the only real obstacle protecting the home, and often fitted with the original cylinder that nobody has replaced since the building was handed over. The third is the cellar or garage box, poorly locked, never monitored, and offering a discreet place to work.
Add to this ground floors and first floors accessible from a terrace or courtyard: in the tight fabric of central Kortrijk, the flat roof of an extension turns a first floor into a ground floor.
Co-ownership: where the line between common and private parts lies
This is the question that most often holds projects up. It has a simple answer.
Everything inside your flat is yours alone to decide: detectors, control panel, indoor siren, contacts on the front door and window frames. No general meeting approval is required to install a wireless system in your own home, and a system with no cabling to run through the shared ducts avoids the debate entirely. The alarm kits and magnetic contacts cover most of this private perimeter.
Anything involving the entrance hall, the façade, the bicycle room or the cellars, on the other hand, falls under the co-ownership: a camera in a common area, an outdoor siren or a new cylinder on the building's door require a collective decision. This is not a dead end, it is a matter of timing: the item must be put on the agenda, and therefore planned several months ahead.
In between lies a useful zone: monitoring your own threshold. A Wi-Fi camera aimed strictly at your front door, without sweeping the shared landing beyond what is necessary or your neighbour's door, stays within the rules. The criterion is the framing, not the intention.
Premiums and free advice: what really exists in Kortrijk
Let us be precise, because the subject is saturated with approximations. We have not identified any municipal security premium regulation specific to Kortrijk. Some Belgian municipalities grant one, but it then funds mechanical protection — locks, cylinders, burglar-resistant glazing, window frames — and not alarms or cameras. Before including any aid in your budget, check that it exists and what its conditions are directly with the relevant city department.
What does exist and can be verified, however, is advice. The City of Kortrijk offers free, personalised burglary prevention advice, provided by its prevention team. The municipality is also covered by the VLAS police zone. The burglary prevention adviser visits your home, examines your actual access points and provides written advice: they sell nothing, and their assessment is the only rational starting point before any purchase.
Alarm and camera in a flat: the legal obligations
They are federal, identical in Kortrijk, Ghent or Namur, and often overlooked in multi-unit housing.
An alarm must be declared within ten days of installation via police-on-web, then confirmed every year. The outdoor siren may not sound for more than three minutes, annual maintenance is required, and no police intervention takes place without prior alarm verification. These rules derive from the Royal Decree of 25 April 2007; our guide on the declaration of an alarm system in Belgium details the procedure.
A camera must be declared on declarationcamera.be, signalled by the regulatory pictogram, accompanied by a register of processing activities, and may film neither the public road nor other people's property. In a block of flats, this last constraint is decisive: a shared landing and your neighbour's door are not your property. The full framework is set out in our article on the camera law in Belgium.
A proportionate set-up for a flat in Kortrijk
The logic differs from that of a house: less floor area to cover, but a main entry point that matters far more.
- A wireless control panel, which can be operated without a compulsory subscription — see the Ajax control panels.
- A magnetic contact on the front door, which signals the opening before anyone has even entered, not afterwards.
- A photo-verification detector in the room people pass through: it directly meets the alarm verification requirement and avoids a pointless call-out. See the detectors with photo verification.
- Contacts on accessible window frames if your flat is on the ground floor, on the first floor above an extension, or has a reachable terrace.
- An indoor siren, whose effect in a block of flats is twofold: it deters, and it alerts the immediate neighbours.
For a flat, the order of magnitude of such a set-up remains noticeably lower than for a house, and varies with the number of access points to be covered. If you are still hesitating between detection and recording, our comparison alarm or camera sets out the criteria, and the national burglary figures put the Kortrijk case in context.
Frequently asked questions
How many burglaries were recorded in Kortrijk in 2025?
224 residential burglaries were recorded in Kortrijk in 2025, an average of 4.3 per week. That is 13.5% fewer than in 2024 (259 incidents) and 21.4% fewer than in 2019 (285 incidents).
Is there a municipal security premium in Kortrijk?
We have not identified any municipal premium regulation specific to Kortrijk. Some Belgian municipalities grant aid, but it then covers mechanical protection — locks, cylinders, burglar-resistant glazing — and excludes alarms and cameras. Check with the city before incurring any costs.
Can I install an alarm in a rented flat or a flat in co-ownership?
Yes, inside your home: a wireless system requires neither drilling in the common parts nor general meeting approval. However, any equipment placed in the entrance hall, on the façade, in the cellars or in the bicycle room falls under the co-ownership and must be decided collectively.
Can a camera film the landing of my building?
It must be framed on your own threshold and may target neither a neighbour's door nor the public road. Any private surveillance camera must also be declared on declarationcamera.be, signalled by the regulatory pictogram and accompanied by a register of processing activities.
Where can I get free burglary prevention advice in Kortrijk?
The City of Kortrijk offers free, personalised burglary prevention advice through its prevention team, and the municipality is covered by the VLAS police zone. The adviser visits your home, examines your actual access points and provides written advice with no commercial interest whatsoever.
Sources: Police crime statistics, Federal Police DGR/DRI/BIPOL, publication 2025_T04 (closing date 24/04/2026) — Kortrijk municipal factsheet. Free burglary prevention advice: City of Kortrijk. Municipal schemes change from one year to the next: check with the municipality before incurring any costs.