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Where in Germany rents are rising rapidly: Report

February 20th 2019

By The Local

Rent prices across nine German cities rose by more than 50 percent between 2005 and 2018, according to a new report.

In Berlin in autumn 2018, tenants who moved house during that time had to pay 9.2 percent more than in the previous year. On average the cost was €10.04 per square metre per month.


As a result, Berlin is now about as expensive a city to live in as Cologne and Düsseldorf, reported the Berliner Zeitung.
In Munich, anyone who moved homes in the last few months of 2018 on average had to spend €16.54 per square meter, while the lowest rent average during that time was found in the Höxton district, in North Rhine-Westphalia, where it was €4.54 per square meter.


The report predicts further hikes in the cost of renting and buying, increasingly also in the surrounding areas of major cities.
"The rising price level is an expression of the continuing imbalance between housing supply and demand – especially in the growth regions," said economist Carolin Wandzik, Managing Director of the Institute for Urban, Regional and Housing Research.

House price divide in Germany


The country is also divided when it comes to buying property. On average, house and apartment prices have risen by almost 70 percent in all major cities over the past 13 years.

Housing prices in the capital rose by 15.2 percent in 2018 compared to the previous year.

But people are still drawn primarily to the so-called "A-cities" like Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Stuttgart, Frankfurt am Main and Düsseldorf. These cities continued to record rising population figures.

Rent and house prices will not go down


The experts do not predict that the real estate market will reverse its trend this year. Particularly in urban regions, it can be assumed that the cost of renting and buying will continue to rise significantly.


They say the problem is that too few homes are being built. This concern is being examined by an alliance of 34 organizations and associations – from the German Tenants'Association, IG BAU to the Central Association of the German Construction Industry – which spoke on Tuesday.

 

They fear that five months after the government’s housing summit, the federal government, the states and the municipalities will "once again lose sight of the urgency to push ahead politically with the construction of new housing".
The alliance called on the coalition to spend more money on social housing. In 2017 alone, 45,000 social housing units had fallen out of rent and disappeared from the market, they said.