Poor chances of owning your own four walls

Status: 21/09/2023, 17:41 p.m.

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Anyone who dreams of owning their own home in the district of Dachau needs one thing above all: a lot of money and patience (symbolic picture). © Christin Klose/dpa-tmn

Pestel Institute notes massive decline in home construction in the district of Dachau.

Dachau – There are around 36,200 apartments in the district of Dachau for which no rent has to be paid because their owners use them themselves. The homeownership rate in the Dachau district is thus around 51.1 percent. This is the result of a recent regional analysis of the housing market carried out by the Pestel Institute in Hanover.

What sounds good at first, however, has a catch. As the researchers further discovered, there were only 127 building permits for new detached and semi-detached houses in the entire district in the first six months of this year. By comparison, in the first half of 2022, there were still 145 building permits. The prognosis made by Matthias Günther, head of the Pestel Institute, is therefore gloomy: "Home construction has declined by twelve percent within just one year. Residential property is still on the slide."

Katharina Metzger from the Federal Association of German Building Materials Retailers (BDB), who commissioned the housing market study from the Pestel Institute, explains in view of the declining construction figures: "The dream of one's own house, of one's own apartment – it is bursting in series right now. When it comes to the purchase of residential property, the district of Dachau has virtually fallen into a state of shock." Only a few people could still afford their own four walls today. "High interest rates, high building land prices, high construction costs, which are mainly driven by high climate protection requirements: home ownership fails because of money," says Metzger.

In their study, the scientists from the Pestel Institute therefore argue in favour of an effective state home ownership programme. The decisive point should be: cheap money. "The state should offer people a fixed low interest rate for 20 years – and that for a loan of up to 4000,<> euros per square meter of living space," demands housing market researcher Günther. As a result, the construction of new detached and semi-detached houses, condominiums and terraced houses could also be "pushed again" in Dachau.

According to the BDB president, what is driving up construction prices in particular are the energy-saving regulations. According to Metzger, anyone who wants to use the federal government's subsidy for their home ownership today must build according to the "extremely ambitious efficiency standard 40". "But it's also extremely expensive. So hardly anyone does it. The state must finally get away from just promoting super-climate protection houses." In the end, the cost-benefit ratio does not fit: "The money that has to be put into climate protection for new buildings will not be used to save energy for years to come," believes the BDB president.

The latest results of the Pestel Institute fit in with the figures recently published by the Hamburg Institute of International Economics on residential real estate prices in the district of Dachau (we reported). The Hamburg researchers had found that in 2022 you had to invest 40.3 annual net rents in the district of Dachau to buy an apartment. In other words, buyers had to wait more than 40 years for their home purchase to be financed by rents. By way of comparison, the national average was only 29 annual rents. Susceptible repairs or depreciation are not even taken into account in this calculation.

Both institutes, the Hanoverian Pestel Institute and the Hamburg Institute of International Economics, therefore came to the same conclusion: the district of Dachau is a really expensive place to live. Dn