The situation on the housing market is tense. Tenants are worried about not being able to afford affordable housing. The German Tenants' Association is sounding the alarm.
Berlin – Hopes for positive developments in the housing market for 2024 are melting away. Fighting the housing shortage is one thing. The other thing is the rising rental price. Housing is becoming increasingly expensive, especially in big cities. “More than one in three tenant households is now overburdened with their housing costs,” Lukas Siebenkotten, President of the German Tenants’ Association, told
Ippen.Media
’s
Merkur.de
. The German Tenants' Association sees politicians as sharing responsibility for the crises.
Crisis in the construction industry: German Tenants' Association expects rent prices to rise in 2024
Siebenkotten also expects rental prices to rise in 2024. “The development of rental prices, especially new and re-letting rents, has taken on an uncontrolled dynamic,” says Siebenkotten. In 2023 alone, rents in Berlin rose by 18.4 percent in 2023, according to the Postbank Housing Atlas. Accordingly, the average square meter cost 14.32 euros.
Record rents are now being demanded in some major German cities. In the fourth quarter of 2023, calls for existing rental apartments across Germany were on average 1.6 percent more than in the previous quarter and 5.8 percent more than in the same period last year, as the real estate portal Immoscout24 recently calculated.
“However, rising rents are not a law of nature. Rents will be increased,” said Siebenkotten. As a legislator, you can counteract this a little. According to Siebenkotten, this could effectively curb the “room for increase that profit-driven landlords use for themselves by finally tightening the rent cap, placing greater limits on rent increases in existing properties and punishing exorbitant rents.”
Rents could continue to rise: finally make affordable housing a “top priority”.
Experts have also been calling for new impetus in the construction industry for a long time. According to Siebenkotten, affordable housing is currently not being built to an even remotely sufficient extent. The housing shortage remains one of the most pressing problems of the time across the country. At the beginning of 2024, building permits for apartments collapsed by 23.5 percent compared to the previous year, as the Federal Statistical Office reported on Monday (March 18). The situation is particularly dramatic for single-family homes: a slump of 42.7 percent at the beginning of the year.
“Affordable housing must finally be made a top priority. An instrument for more and permanently affordable living space would be the introduction of the new non-profit housing system, which the traffic light coalition members have also agreed on,” demands Siebenkotten. This can also be read in the coalition agreement. “If this goal, which we absolutely support, were finally implemented instead of continuing to be successfully blocked by the smallest coalition partner, a huge step towards relaxation on the German rental markets would have been taken.”
High rents and lack of housing: Ampel-Zoff threatens because of projects for the construction industry
According to the
Handelsblatt
, two other important projects that could bring the construction and housing industry forward are also stuck: the amendment to the building code and the reform of the so-called building statistics law. With the amendment to the building code, Building Minister Klara Geywitz (SPD) wants to enable faster procedures. In the future, development plans should be able to be drawn up within twelve months.
With the reform of the Building Construction Statistics Act, the Ministry of Construction wants to improve the data base on statistical figures in housing construction and thus also the political control options. But a quick legislative process is blocked within the traffic lights - according to the Handelsblatt, the FDP is once again blamed.