As of: April 1, 2024, 4:53 a.m
By: Kai Bräunig, Sok Eng Lim, Moritz Maier
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There is a shortage of over 600,000 apartments across Germany. However, almost the same number of apartments are vacant and ready for occupancy. This graphic shows the imbalance in the German housing market.
Berlin – New residential construction has collapsed, and there is a shortage of at least 600,000 apartments nationwide. The federal government wants to spread confidence, but industry associations paint a gloomy picture and a construction crisis that is only getting worse. So what do you do when new apartments can no longer be financed but people need to live somewhere? A factor that is rarely taken into account is empty apartments that are already ready to move into.
IPPEN.MEDIA
has evaluated data on vacancies throughout Germany and shows where the housing market is most tense - and where the search is easy.
Housing shortage in cities: In Munich, one in 1,000 apartments is vacant
According to the Federal Institute for Building, Urban and Spatial Research, around 1.8 million apartments are currently empty in Germany. However, many of them are in need of renovation and are not habitable. According to the latest data from the economic and social research institute Empirica, the so-called market-active vacancies, i.e. apartments that can be rented out immediately or in the medium term, were 554,000 at the end of 2022. When you look at the distribution of these vacant apartments, major differences quickly become clear. There is a massive housing shortage in metropolitan regions. In Frankfurt am Main, only two of every 1,000 apartments are vacant, an average of 0.2 percent. In Berlin there are three, Munich is in the negative top spot with one free apartment.
However, the situation is different in parts of central and eastern Germany and the south of Rhineland-Palatinate. In Southwest Palatinate, 84 out of 1,000 apartments are empty. In the Greiz district in Thuringia it is even 13.5 percent of all apartments. For comparison: In expert circles, between three and five percent is considered an appropriate vacancy level in order to make moves possible.
Unbalanced German housing market
With a total market active vacancy rate of 2.5 percent, Germany is slightly below the desired level. Distribution is problematic. In less than a quarter of the municipalities the housing market is in balance.
The more than half a million empty apartments are now coming into focus because the construction industry is in deep crisis and rents are rising rapidly. Construction prices have recently fallen and the federal government wants to provide new incentives with subsidies. Nevertheless, the target of 400,000 new apartments per year, which is needed to combat the emergency, has been missed for years.
The new building is stagnating
The Association of the German Construction Industry draws a bitter conclusion for the beginning of 2024: “Only 16,800 apartments were approved for new construction and conversions, which was a further significant decline of 23.5 percent compared to the same month last year,” the association told our editorial team. “The situation in home construction is particularly dramatic: there has even been a decline in approvals of 37.8 percent for single- and two-family homes. Things aren’t looking much better in rental housing construction, with a decline of 20.0 percent.”
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There is a shortage of over 600,000 apartments across Germany. At the same time, there are also hundreds of thousands of vacant properties ready to move into. © MAGO / JOKER / Walter G. Allgöwer
“This mammoth task will not be possible with rezoning, extension and densification alone,” says the building association. So will people who live in cities with a housing shortage have to move to the countryside in the future to have somewhere to live? Jens Carstensen, board member of the real estate valuation company bulwiengesa, at least assumes that the ongoing crisis in new construction “will have a stabilizing effect on the vacancy situation.”
The federal government wants to make regions with vacant properties more attractive
In addition to the pure housing shortage, the federal government also believes there needs to be incentives to move to (still) structurally weak regions. That is why the Ministry of Construction is currently working on the so-called “action strategy for activating vacancies”, as it explains to
IPPEN.MEDIA
. “The aim is to increase the attractiveness of these places in regions with particularly high vacancies by improving the connection to local public transport, the establishment of jobs, better funding opportunities for existing renovations and a transfer of knowledge between affected municipalities in order to bring vacant apartments into the market to bring use.”
The findings when looking at the German vacancy rate are diverse. Although there is a large selection of over 550,000 apartments that are ready to move into quickly, these are often located in regions that are not the ideal place to live for many people for various reasons. On average, the vacancy rate nationwide is not too high; it is particularly low in cities. Given the lack of new construction, which, according to experts, will not begin sufficiently in the coming years, the vacancy rate is still coming into focus. The decisive factor will be whether federal and local politicians, as well as companies and society, succeed in making regions with high vacancies attractive places to live apart from free housing.