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Rental apartments in Berlin
Photo: FILIP SINGER / EPA
Millions of German tenants have to adjust to rising housing costs: Germany's largest real estate company, the Dax group Vonovia, considers significant rent increases to be inevitable given the high inflation rates.
"If inflation is permanently at four percent, rents will have to increase accordingly every year in the future," said Vonovia CEO Rolf Buch to the "Handelsblatt".
Otherwise, many landlords would get into serious trouble.
“We can't pretend that inflation is bypassing rents.
That won't work," Buch continued.
The real estate giant owns around 565,000 apartments, most of them in Germany.
The average rent at Vonovia rose to EUR 7.40 per square meter in the first three months of this year – that was 3.1 percent more than a year earlier.
This is still well below the current inflation rate of just under eight percent.
At the same time, the CEO warned that the desired ecological turnaround in energy was in danger of being choked off in practice by rules and regulations.
"We have to apply for our devices from around 900 different network operators - and everyone has a different form," Buch complained in relation to the process for heat pumps.
Everyone wants different data.
"We have only received approval for ten percent of the heat pumps that we applied for last year."
It's not enough to talk about heat pumps, he warned.
“We also need to think about how to get them online quickly.”
mike/AFP
