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KThen there are still advertisements, hardly any moving trucks on the street: in some of the main German cities there are hardly any empty apartments. In Munich and Frankfurt the vacancy rate is just 0.2 percent, in Freiburg it is 0.3 percent, in Münster and Darmstadt 0.4 percent. This arises from a new study by the analysis company Empirica and the real estate consultancy CBRE, which is available to the FAZ. By contrast, the Greiz district in Thuringia is the leader in terms of vacancies with 13.3 percent. Among the cities, Pirmasens in Rhineland-Palatinate is particularly affected. In the former German shoe metropolis, 9.3 percent of apartments were recently vacant. In Chemnitz and Frankfurt / Oder, the figure was 8.4 percent each.
According to the survey, the general German average is 2.8 percent or a good 600,000 apartments. Compared to the analysis at the end of last year, the average vacancy rate has not changed, but the gap between the booming and contracting regions has widened again. In the first, the unemployment rate fell a little more to 1.9 percent, in the second it rose to 8.6 percent. “The development in Leipzig is particularly drastic,” reports Empirica CEO Reiner Braun. In 2014, 6 percent of the apartments in the Saxon city, which is popular with students and creative people, were still empty. At the end of 2019, it was only 2.8 percent. Real estate professionals rate this as a large decline during this period.
“The supply side is the bottleneck in Germany”
According to von Braun, the fact that the figures for 2019 are only available now is due to the complex calculation method. In addition to a good 730,000 housing data from CBRE, the study includes regional data from Empirica and the Federal Statistical Office. Only apartments that can be rented in a short period of time are considered. If you also include dilapidated properties that still need to be extensively renovated, the vacancy rate adds up to nearly 1.1 million apartments and 390,000 private homes.
The great gap between supply and demand in many places has to do with immigration and emigration on the one hand, but also with construction activity. The latter differs significantly by region. Around 80 new apartments were built for 100 newcomers in Düsseldorf between 2015 and 2019. Frankfurt also performs relatively well with 76 new apartments. In Cologne, on the other hand, only 49 new apartments were built for 100 additional residents, in Berlin only 42. It is true that a new apartment is not required for each new inhabitant, couples and families share one. However, large cities attract higher than average numbers of singles. The Federal Statistical Office recently calculated that 42 percent of all people who live alone live in a city with more than 100,000 inhabitants.
Empirica boss Braun does not believe that the tense housing market in the metropolises will ease due to the corona pandemic. Some inhabitants of the city are currently moving to the surrounding area. For the first time in fifteen years, Berlin is losing population, 7,700 less at the end of August. However, people often move out of necessity because people can no longer afford the rents for the living space they want in the city. The apartments that are available are mostly assigned directly to newcomers or those who previously lived in a shared apartment inadvertently. “I can’t imagine the vacancy rate in the swarming cities going up because of Corona,” says Braun.
But that also means that waiting for a drop in rents and purchase prices will be in vain in especially coveted cities. At a virtual conference of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) a few days ago, real estate experts agreed that the upward trend in house prices would continue, driven by low interest rates and rising incomes . “The supply side is the bottleneck in Germany,” said Claus Michelsen of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW).
The new building keeps moving too slow. Now it would be the revenge that the city planners had prepared for a dwindling population twenty years ago. This explains, at least in part, the current problems in Leipzig. By the year 2000, it is estimated that more than 60,000 apartments were vacant in the fair town, a good fifth of the total. Many residents had moved to the West after reunification. Thousands of apartments were demolished because they were considered superfluous, until students and artists discovered the city for themselves due to its old buildings and low rents. Now the construction cranes are turning again, but the new construction is taking time.
There is also another aspect: “We underestimate that an aging society needs more space to live,” Moritz Schularick, an economist at the University of Bonn, said at the OECD event. While students form shared apartments or are satisfied with small apartments, quite a few older people live alone in three or four bedroom apartments because they want to stay in their family family apartment. Therefore, Schularick advises “healthy caution” in the future when it comes to predicting population numbers and the resulting housing needs.
