Vacant apartments are severely punished in Munich. Affordable housing is too scarce in this expensive city for the municipality to afford to be lenient on this issue. The fine can be up to half a million euros if the city learns of unauthorized misappropriation.
But the regulation has loopholes. In the case of planned modernization, for example, or when a sale is pending, the rule that apartments have to be rented out again after three months does not apply. Real estate speculators know how to use this gap by deliberately letting living space and apartments stand empty, supposedly in order to modernize them, but in fact often tear down the buildings afterwards and replace them with luxury buildings.
A procedure that the tenants at Bauerstrasse 10 and 12 also expected from their landlord. According to the tenants, 17 of the 26 apartments in house number 10 alone are empty. The houses have belonged to a company belonging to the Rock Capital Group GmbH, a real estate project developer based in Grünwald, for six years. The company had always argued that the apartments could not be rented due to upcoming renovation measures.
But in mid-April, the residents suddenly noticed a lot of activity. “Within a week, all the vacant apartments were painted and cleaned for viewing,” they say. Name tags were then attached to all associated doorbells and mailboxes – “obviously to give the impression that the house is completely rented”.
The tenants now fear that Rock Capital would like to sell the houses – and could undermine a possible right of first refusal by the city “by pretending to rent them out completely or renting the previously vacant apartments to a commercial landlord for temporary housing”. That would be conceivable with sufficient vacancies, since the buildings are in a conservation statute area. A guess that Westschwabing’s local politicians share. “It looks to me as if the Office for Housing and Migration had warned about the vacancy. And they are now reacting in this way because they are planning something,” believes Gesa Tiedemann (Greens), head of the district committee. As Markus Meiler (CSU) states, “the case of misappropriation is taking on a whole new dynamic.” From his point of view, the fact that the owner has building rights for a densification in the inner courtyard, which expires in four months, would also speak in favor of a sale. “But without planning permission,” says Meiler, “the value of the property falls.”
The social department knows the address and takes a close look
When asked, the social department said that a vacancy of more than three months is irrelevant with regard to the right to misappropriation “if living space is to be sold immediately. A sale and then the reoccupancy of the apartments will be closely monitored.” You know the address and look closely. At Rock Capital itself, nobody wants to comment on the processes and plans after multiple requests. In any case, two of the companies assigned to Rock Capital are still entered as owners in the land register, Bauer Grund Vermögen GmbH (number 10) and Schwabinger Grund Vermögen GmbH (number 12).
The community is very familiar with the houses on Bauerstrasse. When the company wanted to buy the two buildings from Axa Insurance in 2017, the city stepped in on behalf of the tenants and exercised its right of first refusal. In order to acquire the buildings, Rock Capital had no choice but to sign a waiver. The investor thus undertook not to convert the apartments into condominiums or luxury apartments for the next ten years. And when the preservation statute expired shortly afterwards and this protection period would have become waste, the city decided to include the two houses in a new preservation statute area.