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Façade in Munich: Living in the Bavarian state capital is particularly expensive for students
Photo:
Andreas Gebert / picture alliance / dpa
Anyone who rents a room in a German university town these days pays an average of 414 euros a month including heating – more than ever before.
Two years ago, the average room cost 389 euros.
This is the result of the previously unpublished "University Cities Scoring 2021" by the Moses Mendelssohn Institute, which is available to SPIEGEL.
Between the end of December and the beginning of February, the institute evaluated more than 25,000 advertisements for shared accommodation in 97 German university towns and cities.
The regional differences are enormous: students live most expensively in Munich.
Here, a room in a flat-sharing community costs an average of 680 euros per month for a new tenant.
They are followed at some distance by Frankfurt am Main (550 euros), Hamburg and Berlin (both 500 euros).
In Cottbus, the cheapest city in the ranking, students pay an average of only 230 euros for their accommodation, in the Saxon cities of Freiberg, Mittweida and Chemnitz 256 euros.
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Because of the corona pandemic, housing costs for students have hardly increased in the past two years, and in some places they have even fallen.
The online operation, which was part of everyday life at some universities for almost three semesters, had temporarily prevented young people from looking for a room at the place of study.
Instead, some of the first-year students stayed in their children's rooms at home.
This had relieved the housing market.
Since last autumn, however, experts have been observing a trend reversal.
At the start of the winter semester, when a large part of the universities returned to on-site operations, an above-average number of students decided to look for accommodation at their university location, analyzes Stefan Brauckmann, Managing Director at the Moses Mendelssohn Institute.
The price hike hits university locations of all kinds, metropolises as well as small towns in rural areas.
Since October, Annegret Mülbair from the housing portal wg-gesucht.de has observed a »demand increase of 21 percent on an unchanged limited supply«.
That led to the price jump.
Rising energy prices are driving up housing costs
Stefan Brauckmann believes that prices will continue to rise in the coming months, he sees the »beginning of a significant wave of price increases«.
On the one hand, this is due to the fact that some students were forced to study longer than originally planned due to the corona pandemic.
Because seminars, lectures or exams have been canceled due to the pandemic or the young people have not been able to cope with the learning workload in online mode, some studies are dragging on.
"That further reduces the offer for new students," says Brauckmann.
On the other hand, rising energy prices drove up housing costs.
The fact that the heating cost subsidy for BAföG-funded students should be lower than for other housing benefit recipients according to the Federal Government's decision is "a bad signal".
Across Germany, just under a third of students recently lived in shared accommodation.
Around 38 percent lived alone or with a partner in a regular apartment.
Only a small minority of students can currently find a place in a hall of residence run by the Studierendenwerk: according to the Studierendenwerk, the nationwide average is only 8.9 percent.
