Because of the pandemic, many tenants have postponed relocations because of uncertainty about their jobs or income, experts suspect. There were also only limited visits to apartments due to the restrictions on contacts.
Frankfurt / Main (dpa) - In the first weeks of the Corona crisis, apartment seekers found significantly fewer real estate ads.
In the period from March 2, shortly before the shutdown in Germany to April 19, the number of new advertisements for rental apartments fell by up to 38 percent, according to a study by the Hamburg real estate specialist F + B. Recently, however, the minus was reduced to 15 percent, according to the company, which advises cities and municipalities on setting up rent indexes. In the seven largest German cities, the number of advertisements shrank by up to 40 percent, the drop here was just over 11 percent recently.
Because of the pandemic, many tenants have postponed relocations because of uncertainty about their jobs or income, experts suspect. There were also only limited visits to apartments due to the restrictions on contacts.
In the period, rents for newly offered apartments fluctuated significantly less - here the researchers recorded a range of minus 0.2 to plus 2.2 percent. "This means that no or hardly any corona effects can be seen in the analysis of the rental price development," said F + B Managing Director Bernd Leutner on Monday. He believes that landlords would rather not rent immediately than lower rents in anticipation of a recession. On average, there were slight declines in rents in the seven largest German cities.
During the entire first quarter, F + B again saw rising new contract rents. In the first quarter of the year, these increased by 0.6 percent compared to the same period in the previous year. In the portfolio it was 1.2 percent. However, this means that the growth was significantly lower than for condominiums (plus 6.1 percent) and single-family houses (6.9 percent). F + B bases its residential index on supply data from around 22 million properties.
F + B press
