The number is still as set in stone: According to the will of the traffic light coalition, 400,000 apartments are to be built annually from now on, almost 100,000 more than before.

Hopefully, once the offer is significantly larger, tenants and those willing to buy will not have so much difficulty finding a suitable and, above all, affordable apartment.

But does Germany really need such high numbers of new buildings as last seen in the 1990s?

A new study by the analysis company Empirica raises doubts.

Julia Löhr

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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Accordingly, the vacancy rate has recently increased not only in rural regions, which have been struggling with falling population numbers for a long time. For the first time since 2006, individual growth regions are now also recording an increase in the vacancy rate. In the 52 so-called swarm cities, which have attracted a particularly large number of people in recent years, the number of vacant apartments increased from 98,000 to 102,000 between the end of 2019 and the end of 2020 - these are the most recent data available.

It is still only a minor increase.

Apartment hunters in these cities are still far from having the wide range of options.

But such a trend reversal is remarkable in the real estate market with its long reaction times, says Empirica CEO Reiner Braun.

“The new building activities in recent years are having an impact.

The peak of the shortage has presumably passed. "

Anything below 2 percent is considered tense

The real estate market in a city or a district is usually considered to be tense if the vacancy rate there is below 2 percent. In many of these cities, the “market-active vacancy rate” - that is, apartments that can be occupied immediately and no building ruins - has recently not fallen any further, but has risen slightly. In Berlin, for example, the vacancy rate increased from 0.8 to 0.9 percent. Stuttgart, which like Berlin is one of the seven largest cities in Germany (named Top 7), recorded an increase from 0.5 to 0.6 percent. In Regensburg the vacancy rate rose from 0.7 to 0.8 percent, in Heidelberg from 0.6 to 0.7 percent. Karlsruhe, Bamberg, Würzburg, Osnabrück, Wolfsburg - the list of cities with at least a slightly higher vacancy rate could be continued.

Empirica belongs to the group of "real estate wise men", who annually submit an expert opinion of several hundred pages on the situation on the real estate market to the federal government.

The new vacancy figures should be included in the next issue as well as the conclusion that Institute Director Reiner Braun draws from it: "400,000 new apartments a year are rather too many." In his view, it would be sufficient if the last building intensity achieved was maintained.

In 2020, 306,000 apartments were completed in Germany; the data for 2021 are not yet available.

Researchers at the Institute for the German Economy in Cologne recently came to a similar conclusion.

They consider 308,000 new apartments a year to be sufficient.

They see a need above all in metropolitan areas.

Vacancies threatened in the country, they warned.