In Germany it is becoming unaffordable for more and more people to own their own four walls.
The corona crisis also did not bring any relief to the hotly contested real estate market.
Frankfurt / Main - Real estate prices rise and rise.
For many Germans, the dream of owning a home has now become an unreachable distance.
“Who is actually still paying these prices?” Asks the great real estate financier Dr.
Klein in his most recent analysis of the southern German metropolitan regions.
In the second quarter of this year, the average prices for apartments and houses in Munich *, Stuttgart and Frankfurt are already 10 percent higher than a year earlier.
Over the past 15 years, prices have doubled or tripled overall.
Individual executives from industry and banks are still financially strong enough, says Dr. Klein expert Roland Lenz.
Although there is a risk of negative consequences for working life, everyone else fled to the surrounding area.
"I consider a work culture with home office regulations to be irreversible, as most owners have pulled out so far that daily commuting would be a great burden," says Lenz.
And further figures show: The rising real estate prices are not a pure metropolitan phenomenon - and also not a purely southern German one.
Real estate market: catch-up effects make house prices even more expensive
While the corona crisis could not affect the real estate market in Germany, the experts are now expecting catch-up effects.
According to a forecast by the Hamburg Gewos Institute for Urban, Regional and Residential Research, total real estate sales will increase by 6.3 percent to 311.1 billion euros in the current year.
In the previous record year of 2020, sales were just under 293 billion euros.
The main drivers are residential real estate, the volume of which is expected to grow by 7.5 percent from the previous year to 237.7 billion euros.
At the same time, the number of transactions will only increase slightly by 1.4 percent.
The average price per purchase case continues to rise.
There was no respite in the Corona year 2020, explains Gewos expert Sebastian Wunsch.
Market activity is increasingly shifting from the bought-out markets in the big cities to the suburbs and rural areas.
The trend towards the surrounding area appears to be increasing in the light of the pandemic experiences, Wunsch said.
One- and two-family houses are particularly in demand, for which Gewos registered an all-time high of 259,300 sales across Germany last year.
Real estate market: prices for single-family houses rise by 17 percent - within a year
The prices have risen further, reports Gewos on the basis of the actual transactions. “The price dynamic in the area of owner-occupied residential property has increased again in the wake of the corona pandemic. With 10.8 percent for homes and 7.2 percent for condominiums, we recorded the strongest price increases in 2020 since we began our records in the 1980s. "
This is also confirmed by a study by real estate economists at the University of Regensburg on behalf of the union-affiliated Hans Böckler Foundation.
Accordingly, the pandemic effect on asking prices for condominiums was 0.7 percentage points nationwide on average.
In the case of one and two-family houses, it was even 1.1 percentage points, as the foundation reported on Wednesday.
Overall, the asking prices for condominiums rose by an average of 17 percent between the 1st quarter of 2020 and the 2nd quarter of 2021, and those for single-family houses by 15.6 percent.
Real estate prices and rents are rising faster than income
The effect on rents is smaller and also different from region to region: While the pandemic slightly dampened growth in new rents in large and medium-sized cities, the asking rents for new contracts in more rural regions have also gone up due to Corona *. Nationwide, however, asking rents have also risen by 5.0 percent, so that tenant households have to spend an ever-increasing part of their budget on housing.
Driven by high construction prices and a lack of investment alternatives, rents and property purchase prices have again risen faster than incomes, the Regensburg study found. That increases the inequality in the markets. In many places, home ownership is becoming “increasingly unaffordable”, especially for households with average or lower incomes.
(dpa) * Merkur.de is part of IPPEN-MEDIA
