Buy or Rent? For many, this is at most a rhetorical question; owning a house or an apartment is usually too expensive, especially in large cities and their surrounding areas. The average price per square meter for new condominiums in Munich, for example, has risen from 9,950 to 11,100 euros, the real estate association South recently reported – and that within the last six months alone.
So mostly only rent remains.
But it doesn’t look much better, as a new evaluation of the broker portal Homeday shows for smaller and larger rental and condominiums. For this, not only were the asking prices in individual cities and districts compared, they were also put in relation to income. This was based on the respective median local income, i.e. the value that lies exactly in the middle if all incomes in the city are ranked according to their level. From this perspective, outliers have a less distorting effect, both upwards and downwards.
The result is quite surprising, at least on the rental market: of the ten least affordable districts for families looking for rental accommodation, seven are in Berlin, only two in Munich and one in Hamburg. The reason: In the capital, the monthly net income of a family with two median earners is 4,377 euros, almost 1,000 euros lower than in Munich. Regardless of whether in popular Berlin areas such as Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg and Kreuzberg, or in rather quiet areas such as Wilmersdorf and Westend: The rental apartments on offer are not affordable for the Median family everywhere. A few days before the referendum on the expropriation of large landlords in the city, this is an explosive finding.
But that doesn’t mean that Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt or Stuttgart are cozy for people with low and middle incomes. Even between Hafencity and Haidhausen, Ottensen and Obergiesing, the Median family often has to pay 40 percent and more of the monthly net rent, the data show. And with singles, values of well over 50 percent are also achieved. However, a maximum of 30 percent is considered economically reasonable, a value that only falls below 77th place in the list. There you will find districts of Cologne and Düsseldorf as well as the outskirts of Hamburg.
But it only gets really cheap elsewhere. For significantly less than 20 percent of the local median income, both singles and families can rent in the east or in the Ruhr area, for example in Leipzig, Magdeburg and Chemnitz or in Dortmund, Essen and Duisburg.
The housing business is going like never before
Of course, this evaluation cannot show the whole picture either. For the comparison, the offers on real estate portals on the Internet were considered in the second quarter, for families, for example, for rental apartments between 48 and 143 square meters. It was sufficient if at least five different evaluable advertisements appeared in each district during the study period. According to the authors, a total of around 30,000 advertisements were included in the comparison. What does not appear with this are, for example, apartments that find a new tenant directly or are given to their members by cooperatives, often at significantly lower prices than on the free market. Nevertheless, the result fits in with a trend: Corona has not made living cheaper – on the contrary.
The pandemic has slightly dampened the increase in new rents in large and medium-sized cities, according to a study by real estate economists at the University of Regensburg on behalf of the union-affiliated Hans Böckler Foundation. On the other hand, the asking prices in more rural regions have also gone up – also because many people moved away from the cities in times of lockdown and home office. Nationwide, asking rents still rose by five percent, according to the researchers, which is why tenant households have to spend an ever larger part of their budget on living.
And there is no end in sight to this development – because the residential space business is going like never before. The Hamburg Gewos Institute expects houses and apartments to be sold and bought for almost 238 billion euros this year. That would be 7.5 percent more than in the previous year. The number of transactions will only increase slightly, by an estimated 1.4 percent. For people looking for an apartment, this means above all that it will be even more expensive – when buying and then probably also renting.