The planned merger of the two municipal housing companies GWG and Gewofag to form “Münchner Wohnen” is to be completed as planned on January 1st – despite the departure of two managing directors this year. The current and further path to the merger will be presented to the city council at the general assembly next Wednesday. The date is “fully tenable,” confirmed Mayor Verena Dietl at a press conference on Wednesday. She again pointed out the “synergy effects” that the merger would bring. This will save you a good 45 million euros over the next three years.
The largest share was made up of personnel costs as a one-off effect of 29.3 million euros, said city planning officer Elisabeth Merk. However, this only refers to the fact that the job creation planned by the companies for the future will be reduced, explained Armin Hagen, interim managing director of the GWG. Nobody will lose their job. The city estimates the savings from reorganizing loans at 9.6 million euros; to 5.5 million euros those in the IT sector.
Of course, the merger has also incurred costs so far: politicians had budgeted five million for it, and 2.8 million have already been used for external services. Dietl said she was convinced that the rest would no longer be needed, but that the future Münchner Wohnen would manage it “on its own with its expertise.”
Above all, the future large corporation should become more effective in building new apartments: the town hall coalition has set a target of 2,000 per year. While Mayor Dietl recently expressed confidence that this goal could soon be achieved, city planning officer Merk, Gewofag managing director Doris Zoller and GWG interim boss Armin Hagen seemed a little more cautious on Wednesday. What matters most is the economic conditions, said Hagen.
At the beginning of the year, the two companies with 500 (GWG) and 580 full-time positions (Gewofag) are to merge into one. The new group will have around 70,000 apartments, which will then be one of the largest housing companies in Germany. Interim boss Doris Zoller and Christian Müller, who will start as managing director at Gewofag on December 1st, will lead the company into the merger after the departure of short-term boss Andreas Lehner.
GWG interim boss Hagen will take on the role of commercial authorized representative at Münchner Wohnen, which he previously held at GWG. It was his wish to take a step back, said Dietl; Hagen himself said he was a “very good second man.” The supervisory board will probably start looking for a CEO again in the new year. The committee wants to make a decision on this at the end of November.
The tenants of the future Münchner Wohnen will be even more interested in what happens with their rent payments than the personal details at the top of the group. There has been a rent freeze for city apartments since 2019 and until 2024. What will become of this will also be discussed in the city council next Wednesday. The SPD wants to extend the rent freeze across the board, but criticism comes from the opposition.
The Left/The Party faction has now presented its own concept. The rent freeze is to be extended until the end of 2026. This is important “given the current developments in inflation and the high energy prices of the Munich municipal utility,” says the justification for an urgent motion for the general meeting.
At the same time, the proposal envisages further developing the concept of social rent caps (KSM) with several points that will then apply from January 2027: For example, tenants should not have to spend more than 30 percent of their income on gross rent. There should be no rent increases for low and middle incomes. For a one-person household, for example, a gross annual salary of 40,000 euros should apply as a guideline.