Rising construction costs, high land prices, rapidly rising interest rates: these are anything but rosy times for builders.
The market in Peiting is also feeling the effects.
Only four applications were received for the twelve new municipal building sites at Bachfeld.
Will the single-family home become obsolete?
Peiting – The road is finished, sewer and water pipes have also been laid.
In the new construction area at Bachfeld in Peiting, everything has long been arranged for the future builders who want to realize their dream of a house there.
But for many of the more than 400 interested parties who have registered for a building site with the municipality in recent years, this dream of owning a home has apparently come to an end for the time being.
Only four applications were received for the twelve plots that the municipality had recently offered as part of a tendering process.
Of course, the low demand does not come as a surprise to Managing Director Stefan Kort.
High construction costs, plus significantly higher interest rates and, last but not least, the expensive prices for the plots of land, which range between 245,000 euros for a semi-detached house plot of 361 square meters and 556,000 euros for a single-family house plot with 868 square meters: under these conditions it is for many difficult to implement such a construction project, says Kort.
No trend reversal in sight
Meanwhile, the excavators are already rolling on the Bachfeld for the development of the next construction area.
At the end of the year, the allocation of eight further municipal plots of land is to start there, and an additional ten plots will be added in the Heimgartenstraße construction area.
The plots in both are significantly smaller than in Bachfeld I. But Kort does not believe that demand will increase rapidly as a result.
In Bachfeld, for example, only one interested party applied for one of the cheaper semi-detached house plots.
"It won't get any cheaper."
Now, of course, it can be argued that semi-detached houses are more difficult to sell based on recent experience.
As is well known, the municipality had offered the same in cooperation with a property developer as a complete package on the Drosselstrasse.
However, the sale was slow, according to Kort, all ten semi-detached houses have only recently been sold.
The asking price of up to 700,000 euros proved to be a stumbling block more than a year ago.
But since then the situation has not eased, quite the opposite.
The standard land value almost doubled to 600 euros per square meter, "and who would have thought that interest rates would rise from 0.7 to almost four percent in a year and a half," says Kort, explaining the dramatic development.
Of course, it was not foreseeable that the general conditions would change in this way when the municipality went in search of a replacement after the end of the large Basiliwiese construction area in 2019 in order to meet the demand for building land.
But now the question arises, what to do with so many plots of land for which there is hardly any demand?
The mayor still sees the situation as relaxed
Mayor Peter Ostenrieder sees the situation as relaxed.
There used to be times when building areas weren't allocated overnight, he recalls.
He is convinced that the land will find a buyer in the next few years, after all Peiting is a place where living space is needed.
But should the community no longer focus on building housing, as the Greens have repeatedly called for in the past for new development areas?
Ostenrieder refers to the municipal council, which decided against it.
"Should the plots of land remain lying around like sour beer over the next few years, we may have to think about replanning again," the town hall chief does not want to completely rule out corrections to the development plans.
Ostenrieder does not believe that it will come to that.
"There are people who can afford it." Recently, they have already reacted and allowed a second residential unit to make rental income possible.
But it is also clear that many families find it difficult to finance when the dream of owning their own home costs between one and 1.5 million euros.
"You can hardly pay that off in one generation."
Leasehold as a future model?
For the Heimgarten building area, they therefore want to break new ground and offer a leasehold model.
It is a novelty in Peiting, whether it is “the yellow of the egg remains to be seen”, Ostenrieder says cautiously.
At a bank event for builders, Kort recently sounded out interest – with a sobering result: “No one present came forward.”
You can find more current news from the region around Schongau at Merkur.de/Schongau.