In early December, 17 construction industry associations signed a letter of fire addressed to the federal government. The situation on the real estate market is alarming. “High construction, energy and material costs, rising interest rates, lengthy construction and planning processes, and housing subsidies that have collapsed multiple times are leading to a downward spiral in housing construction with serious consequences.” , says the three-page document. After boom years, the construction sector is facing a looming storm.
According to the associations, the measures taken by the federal government to take countermeasures have so far been insufficient. This is explosive, because problems in the sector are causing urgently needed new housing construction to stagnate. Especially the director general of the Central Real Estate Committee, Oliver Wittke, finds drastic words, even speaking of collapse.
Real estate analysis shows: Residential construction is particularly stagnant here
In which cities is it particularly newly built Apartments A new analysis by the brokerage firm von Poll Immobilien shows that fewer apartments were completed in eleven of the 21 cities surveyed in 2021 than in the previous year. Particularly explosive: among them there are even large cities such as Monk, Berlin or Hamburg, where the population has grown disproportionately in recent years. Furthermore, this trend is likely to continue for now. Building permits were even reduced in 15 out of 21 locations.
In order to be able to compare the new building offensive in different cities, von Poll examined the number of permits and completions of new apartments per 1000 inhabitants. While the number of new building completions shows in concrete terms what has been built in the past, permits show a trend as to how much more will be built in the near future.
The fewest number of completions for apartments in the period from 2017 to 2021 there were accordingly in Duisburg with a score of 6.1 and Bochum with 8.2 per 1000 inhabitants. Duisburg is also lagging behind in terms of permits. Between 2017 and 2021, only 7.7 apartments per 1000 inhabitants were approved here. In Bochum the number was 13.9 approved apartments.
Preliminary calculations by the Federal Institute for Building, Urban and Spatial Research assume that the population will decline in many regions of the Ruhr Area by 2040. Cities recently listed as Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen or Essen, however, the number of inhabitants is growing slightly again. However, fewer apartments have been built in Essen recently than in the previous year.
- Meanwhile, most of the flats have been able to move out Frankfurt I’m main finally. Here there were 29.2 apartments for every 1000 inhabitants. The number of approved apartments was 37.1.
- Munich, Hamburg and Münster the main metropolis follows with 27.8, 25.7 and 25.1 completed apartments respectively. Munich ranks first in the analysis of building permits with 38.7 apartments per 1,000 inhabitants. While Münster recorded 32.4 permits in the survey period, there were 29.9 approved apartments for every 1,000 inhabitants in Hamburg.
It is also interesting to take a look at the ratio of completions to housing stock in von Poll’s analysis of the respective city up to 2021. Frankfurt am Main is again the frontrunner in this case, where the housing stock increased by 5.9% in the period from 2017 to 2021, 377,989 apartments grew. “The special feature of Frankfurt am Main is, among other things, the strong development of residential high-rise buildings, which is not found in any other German metropolis to this extent. The city is growing in width and height,” analyzes Daniel Ritter, managing partner of von Poll Immobilien.
The housing stock reached its lowest level during the analysis period in Duisburg with only 1.2% to 249,971 apartments, Bochum with 1.6% to 190,921 apartments and Essen with 1.9% to 305,634 apartments. Also in HanoverKarlsruhe, ColonyDortmund, Stuttgart and Bremen, living space will only grow by 2 to 3 percent between 2017 and 2021.
Politics must act
In Daniel Ritter’s eyes, this is too little to meet the federal government’s goal of 400,000 new apartments a year. “Politicians must finally take action and counter this with faster approval procedures, designations of building land and building subsidies. This is the only way to narrow the gap between population growth and housing needs,” Ritter asks.
A study by the analyst firm Empirica recently showed how great the housing need is in Germany. The authors of Empirica had shown how high the vacancy rate is in the German regions. Because the housing market in a city or neighborhood is usually considered tight if the vacancy rate is less than 2%. It turned out that the situation is especially difficult in many large cities. In Munich, for example, only 0.2 percent of apartments were vacant at the end of 2021, exactly as it was in 2016. In Frankfurt, the vacancy rate dropped from 0.5 to 0.3 percent, the same is true for Münster and Freiburg.
After all: Construction Minister Klara Geywitz (spd) admitted in recent days that there is an urgent need to catch up with regards to the housing sector. But he sees the blame mostly on the previous government: due to their years of political neglect, they lack construction research, digitization and, ultimately, productivity. “We have to change that,” Geywitz stressed. “Then we also have the situation where we have good framework conditions for the capacity to build so much.”
