Building land mobilization law: More tenant protection, fewer vacant lots

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After years of preparation and disputes, the factions of the grand coalition have agreed on a reform of the building laws.

The new rules in the nationwide Building Code (BauGB) are intended on the one hand to enable faster construction of new homes and on the other hand to prevent accelerated price increases in existing houses that can displace the tenants resident there.

“This week the Bundestag finally passes the building land mobilization law.

The legislature's largest building policy project will come into force, ”said Sören Bartol, deputy chairman of the SPD parliamentary group.

Overall, the SPD was satisfied with the new rules.

They would protect tenants better and put more instruments in the hands of cities and municipalities to intervene in the market, for example with an extended right of first refusal.

The German Association of Cities and the Association of Cities and Towns also wanted the mayors to have more power.

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Federal Building Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) had also urged more market intervention in some places.

In the CDU, on the other hand, enthusiasm is limited, as was heard from coalition circles.

Most of the changes in the Building Code are aimed at metropolitan areas and areas with a tight housing market.

In the future, owners will have to obtain approval from the building authorities there if they want to divide larger apartment buildings into individual properties.

This conversion usually results in condominiums at relatively high purchase prices.

"Normal earners in many cities have long since been left behind by the market, and only a small minority or professional investors can afford the condominiums that are being built," says Bartol.

“It is pure fantasy that conversion should help tenants in the apartments in question to build property.

In truth, it's all about fast money: shopping, converting, modernizing, reselling. "

Flexible small owner regulation

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The approval requirement was the most controversial point of the reform. For months, the coalition parties could not agree. The compromise now provides for a small owner regulation: landlords of up to five apartments can - outside of milieu protection areas - convert without a permit. The federal states can change this size limit and set their own maximum size between three and 15 residential units.

From Bartol's point of view, this restriction should be determined in practice for purely political reasons.

In federal states with a black-yellow or black-green government, the SPD politician expects a limit in the upper range so that even larger apartment buildings can be converted into property.

Countries like Berlin, on the other hand, would rather opt for the number three - which in fact amounts to a complete halt to conversion in the city, which is characterized by large rental apartment buildings.

Jan Marco Luczak, spokesman for the CDU / CSU parliamentary group for law and consumer protection, describes the new regulation as a “conversion ban” that “bursts the dreams of many people”.

Even the small owner regulation does not change anything.

"It would have been better if we had brought tenant protection and property building together," says Luczak.

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As with the rental price brake since 2015, the federal states should determine where the new conversion brake should apply at all. It will be anything but easy for the citizens, because the state governments have already proven in the past that they are overwhelmed with the ordinances and their justifications for individual areas. Since 2015, many courts have conceded the incomplete state regulations, and a number of legal disputes between landlords and tenants came to nothing.

The managing director of the German Association of Cities, Helmut Dedy, sees the danger of unsuitable state regulations and emphasized a few weeks ago in an interview with WELT: “The cities can and want to decide for themselves when and to what extent it is appropriate to use the planning instruments of the building code to do. ”Nothing will come of that.

Cities and municipalities should also only be able to use other instruments where the federal states allow it.

This also applies, for example, to the new right of first refusal, under which municipalities can pre-empt a private buyer.

If a residential property is sold in the future, municipalities now have three months instead of the previous two to exercise a right of first refusal.

And when they strike, they only have to pay a market value determined by means of an appraisal, not the market price, which is often very high in overheated real estate markets.

Forcing property owners to build

Conversion and pre-purchase relate to existing buildings, but things will also change when it comes to new construction.

Cities and municipalities receive an extended building permit with which they can force the owners of undeveloped land to build a residential building within a certain period of time - unless the land is to be passed on to close family members.

There are also new measures for compaction and roof extensions.

Vacant lots can be ticked off a little easier than before in terms of planning law.

In order to be able to expand more attic storeys, the municipalities will in future be able to deal more flexibly with the number of floors specified in the development plan.

So in some cities, citizens have to expect it to get tighter.

In rural areas, too, new residential construction should work a little easier than before. There is a new definition of the area for villages, according to which, for example, buildings used for agriculture can more easily be converted into living space, or new houses can be built in the immediate vicinity. And last but not least, Paragraph 13b will be extended, which allows new building areas to be designated in addition to existing residential areas on the outskirts without costly environmental assessments. The regulation is initially limited to 2025 - and an opportunity for many who dream of a single-family home in the country.

The German Tenants' Association welcomed some of the new regulations, such as the reservation of approval for conversions, but criticized the fact that the federal states should first determine what cities and municipalities are now allowed to do.

"The result is a compromise that brings improvements, but is dependent on the implementation of the respective state government at the instigation of the Union," said the director of the German Tenants' Association, Lukas Siebenkotten.

"There is a threat of a patchwork of housing policy."

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Sharp criticism comes from the landlords' association Haus & Grund: "Once again, the CDU has buckled in negotiations with the SPD at the expense of the small private landlords in order to preserve the coalition peace that actually no longer exists," said association president Kai Warnecke.

"Apparently the Union has said goodbye to being the party of private property."

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