In Berlin
85% of people rent their homes — and prices are spiralling
The end of a rental cap and a shortage of stock are
making the German capital unaffordable for many
The cafés and restaurants of Prenzlauer Berg, home to
well-to-do young families © dpa picture alliance/Alamy
Zoe Dare
Hall OCTOBER 22 2021
In a city
of renters, 30-year-old Martin Rowe, who works for a music software company,
considers himself one of the lucky ones. Thanks to a legal loophole known as
Nachvertrag — “where you sign your name on an old rental contract from someone
you know, which preserves the low rent price without handing the apartment back
to the owner,” he explains — Rowe and his partner rent their two-bedroom flat
near Treptower Park, “a quiet neighbourhood of families and chilled-out
creatives”, for €730 a month, including bills.
“My
contract is about 15 years old and, in that time, it has been passed forward
four times, which is not uncommon here,” says Rowe, who moved from the UK to
Berlin as an Erasmus student in 2013.
“I know
everyone who has lived in this apartment over that time. We sometimes hang out
and share stories about the neighbours. This domestic oral history is a unique
side effect of the mind-boggling battles between house owners and tenants in
Berlin.”
For every
fortunate renter like Rowe, though, many more are struggling to live in the
German capital. According to research by Homeday estate agency, 17 out of 19
neighbourhoods are now unaffordable to the average earner, based on “rental
burden” — the amount of someone’s net salary that goes on monthly rent. A
rental burden of more than 40 per cent is deemed too high.
Charlottenburg is among Berlin’s 10 most
expensive rental areas © Bildagentur-online/Joko/Alamy
Earlier this
year, when a Berlin-wide rent cap was overturned by the federal courts, many
tenants had to refund to their landlords the difference between what they were
paying and the market rate in a lump sum. “Friends were suddenly hawking their
valuables on Instagram to make up the thousands of euros they had to repay
within a month,” says Rowe.
About 85
per cent of Berliners rent, and it’s become part of the city’s DNA. Locals talk
of how historically affordable rents have helped to cement a strong sense of
community — and broaden the city’s appeal.
“Berlin has
a different mindset to other European capitals, with underlying socialist
values and a resentment of outright capitalism,” says Ed Brooks, 28, a
marketing manager who moved there from London two years ago. Now, it is lack of
affordability that’s keeping communities together, “as finding a place to live
is so difficult that it puts most people off moving,” adds Brooks, who pays
€1,150 a month for his one-bed, 72 sq m flat in Prenzlauer Berg, previously
part of communist East Berlin, “and now one of the most popular neighbourhoods
for young families,” he says.
Rents have
risen by 36 per cent in the past five years, based on median asking prices,
according to data by the property portals Immowelt and Immonet. In the most
expensive areas, including Mitte, Wilmersdorf and Prenzlauer Berg, the average
rent for a 59 sq m apartment is more than €1,200 per month, according to
Homeday. In the more affordable areas of Steglitz and Rosenthal, the average is
under €900 per month.
Mitte —
Berlin’s historic core, which includes the landmark Brandenburg Gate and
sprawling Tiergarten park — is Germany’s second-most unaffordable
neighbourhood, with someone earning the average Berlin salary needing to spend
62 per cent of their net income on rent to live there, according to Homeday.
There is also still an east-west divide when it comes to median monthly net
salaries: €2,199 in urban areas that used to be in West Germany, compared with
€1,854 in those located in former East Germany, according to Homeday.
“The
situation is most challenging for young people moving to the city, particularly
students, single-income households or anyone without ‘old’ rental contracts
which command significantly lower rents,” says Meeri Rebane, co-founder and
chief executive of INZMO, a Berlin-based insurtech company.
“One issue
is affordability; another is the availability of rental premises. The shortage
is driving up rental prices,” adds Rebane, whose rental deposit guarantee
product for tenants, starting from €3 a month, provides an alternative to
paying a deposit upfront (typically of three months’ rent).
When it
comes to addressing the shortage of rental stock and spiralling prices,
however, Berliners have spoken. In a referendum last month titled “Expropriate
Deutsche Wohnen & Co”, 56 per cent of voters backed a move to place 240,000
corporate-owned apartments — about 15 per cent of Berlin’s total rented stock —
back into public ownership and available at affordable rents.
Berlin is
not alone in proposing drastic measures to combat fast-rising rental prices. As
one of Spain’s “tense housing markets”, Barcelona recently extended its rent
cap to five years, “which has had many critics”, says Mark Stucklin, founder of
Spanish Property Insight, an independent real estate data and analysis website.
Data from Idealista, the Madrid-based property portal, suggests that the rent
cap is reducing the supply of homes to rent, he adds, and keeping prices high.
“The city’s
on the way to becoming a no-go area for serious investors too, which won’t be
good for the rental supply side in the long run.”
Berlin’s
controversial referendum proposal is not legally binding — and, if enacted, will
come at a huge cost to the city, on top of nearly €2.5bn recently spent on
buying 14,750 apartments from two large corporate landlords.
“[The
expropriation of properties] is unlikely to take place,” says property analyst
Peter Rabitz, founder of Your Berlin Agent. “The cost of compensating these
companies at market value is estimated to be €24bn- €30bn. It’s not practical
and wouldn’t create any new living space within the city,” he says. “It also
wouldn’t leave enough money to carry out much-needed refurbishments to these
homes. Imagine what could be built with €30bn instead!”
The
referendum does, however, mark “the next stage of escalation” after more than
10 years of pressure on the rental market, says Clemens Paschke, chief
executive of Ziegert estate agency. “There is a massive imbalance of supply and
demand, and that’s going to get worse as the population is forecast to grow by
10 per cent in the next 10 years.”
Adding to
Berlin’s “challenges”, he says, are laws governing “milieu protection areas”,
which prevent landlords from dividing buildings into condominiums. Building
more houses is an obvious solution, “but it can take two years to get permits,
up to eight years in total, from finding the land to completion”.
What most
agree is that Berlin needs to fast-track its building permit system to speed up
construction. “Nationalisation is a short-term and rather populist approach and
not a lasting solution,” says Steffen Wicker, founder and chief executive of
Homeday. “The answer is to create more affordable living spaces in areas where
people want to live. The state can contribute to this through re-densification
in central areas, less bureaucracy, accelerated approval procedures and by
creating better transport to the suburbs — as the commuter belt around Berlin
is now experiencing even larger price increases, in properties for sale, than
the urban areas.”
Berlin’s
lack of sale and rental stock means it is one of the few German cities where
residential prices are still rising. The median asking price for existing
buildings is currently €5,140 per sq m, up 4.8 per cent on October 2020, according
to Immowelt and Immonet data.
“At the
high end, most of our sales are new-build as there’s very limited supply of
existing buildings. We saw the €10,000 per sq m benchmark hit five years ago
for the first time. Now it’s up to €25,000 per sq m for the very best
penthouses in landmark projects,” says Paschke.
Rabitz adds
that in popular places such as Friedrichshain — a gentrified area once famous
for its student feel — he has seen three large family apartments go over asking
price.
For most
Berliners, however, ownership remains out of the question. And as a tenant in
this rental capital, you’d better make sure you get on with the neighbours. You
may find yourself living side by side for many years to come.
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário