"Prices are far too high": Expert expects the end of single-family homes
Created: 05/12/2022, 16:55
By: Lisa Mayerhofer
According to estimates by industry associations, residential construction in Bavaria and Germany is on the verge of a slump in 2023.
(Archive image) © Julian Stratenschulte/dpa
The war in Ukraine and the corona pandemic have severely disrupted the supply chains of the construction industry.
Residential construction is about to collapse.
An expert expects people to move away from single-family homes.
Munich – According to industry associations, residential construction in Germany is on the verge of a slump in 2023.
The main reasons are a lack of materials and a rapid increase in costs caused by the corona pandemic and the Ukraine war.
This makes the costs of new construction projects unpredictable for both the contracting housing company and many executing construction companies and craftsmen, as is unanimously said in the housing and construction industry.
High costs: slump in residential construction expected from 2023
"There will be slumps, and very clear ones at that," says Hans Maier, director of the Association of the Bavarian Housing Industry (vdw), the German Press Agency.
“We had record completions in 2021, we will have good completions in 2022, and we will see a slump in 2023.”
This largely agrees with the assessment of the North German sister association VNW: "Due to the long lead times, the construction will be completed this year and next, and it will be over by 2024/25 at the latest," expects VNW Director Andreas Breitner for North Germany.
In both associations, mainly socially oriented cooperatives and municipal housing companies are united, which offer affordable housing.
In a recently published survey by the main association of the German construction industry, 90 percent of companies complained about price increases and 80 percent about delivery bottlenecks.
According to this, building material suppliers for many materials currently only quote daily prices or no prices at all.
Material bottlenecks are causing problems for the construction and housing industry
"It's a situation we've never had before," reports a spokesman for the Bavarian building guilds' regional association in Munich.
“We have a huge wave of orders, and at the same time there is a lack of raw materials.
We have massive price increases every eight weeks.”
According to the construction and housing industry, steel and steel alloys, the aluminum and wood used in many building materials are partly not available.
Insulating materials are scarce, as is bitumen, which is important for road construction, and there are bottlenecks and massive price increases for tiles and ceramics.
Clients and construction companies usually agree on fixed prices in their contracts before construction begins.
If material costs rise as fast as they are now, construction companies run the risk of ending up making losses despite working at full capacity.
In order to prevent red numbers, many companies are no longer applying for new orders: "As a result, more than 30 percent of construction companies are no longer submitting any new offers," according to the construction industry association in Berlin.
Expert predicts move away from single-family homes
Expert Christoph Blepp believes that this development will primarily affect single-family homes.
The founding partner at S&B Strategy, a management consultancy that deals with takeovers and strategies in the construction sector, told
focus.de
: "There will be shifts in the structure: away from single-family houses, which are far too expensive in price, towards multi-storey buildings .”
The figures prove him right: According to the Federal Statistical Office, the proportion of single-family homes in Germany has been falling since 2005.
Multi-family houses, on the other hand, are being built more frequently.
(lma/dpa)