Politicians make a lot of talk about themselves.

With proposals for new laws.

criticism of other parties.

And recently also with stories about her apartment hunt.

SPD General Secretary Kevin Kühnert complained last week in the “Tagesspiegel” podcast that he had been looking in vain for a new apartment in Berlin for more than a year.

It could hardly be the money.

"But it fails because of the offer," he concludes.

There are many furnished apartments, as well as exchange offers.

Just not normal apartments.

The housing market in the capital is the "plague".

Former SPD chairman Norbert Walter-Borjans also had to search a long time before he found what he was looking for when he returned to Cologne.

He reported that there were usually 50 or more interested parties in the race before him.

Julia Loehr

Business correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

Shortage rental apartment?

Many citizens have similar experiences as the two politicians.

However, an evaluation by the analysis company Empirica shows that the feeling can only be partially documented with numbers.

In most large German cities, the number of rental apartments on offer has not declined in recent years, but in some cases has even risen sharply.

The leader is Stuttgart: the number of advertisements there has increased by 90 percent since 2016.

In Munich the plus was 41 percent, in Frankfurt 39 percent and in Düsseldorf still 20 percent.

The outlier below is the city Kevin Kühnert is looking for: Berlin.

The number of rental advertisements there has fallen by 17 percent since 2016.

More and more furnished apartments

"In most cities there is no dramatic decline," Empirica CEO Reiner Braun summarizes the results.

Berlin is a special case: "We see the consequences of the rent cap." The red-red-green Berlin Senate launched a legislative initiative in 2019 to stop the price increase with fixed rent caps.

As a result, many property owners no longer offered vacant apartments for rent, but for sale.

In 2021, the Federal Constitutional Court tipped the lid.

Since then, the number of rental advertisements in Berlin has risen again somewhat, but is still below the level of previous years.

Of the seven largest German cities, Berlin had the most rental advertisements in absolute terms in 2021: around 80,000.

However, the city also has 3.7 million inhabitants, more than any other city in Germany.

There were around 55,000 rental advertisements in Hamburg and 50,000 in Munich.

Frankfurt, Cologne and Düsseldorf are in the middle with numbers of 30,000 or more, while Stuttgart is at the lower end with 25,000 advertisements.

How much movement there is on the rental market depends on many factors.

Sometimes apartments are offered because the previous residents are moving into new buildings in the same city.

Others move to the surrounding area.

The trend that Kühnert complains about, that apartments are increasingly being offered furnished, actually exists in all cities.

Plus 74 percent in Stuttgart, plus 56 percent in Düsseldorf, plus 47 percent in Frankfurt: In some places, the number of advertisements for furnished apartments has really skyrocketed since 2016.

With an increase of 19 percent, Berlin is still at the lower end of the range.

The number of advertisements for unfurnished apartments, on the other hand, has fallen since 2016, at least in some cities.

The decline is greatest in Berlin at minus 30 percent, while Hamburg and Cologne are in the single-digit percentage range.

Expensive new builds

The fact that furniture is popular among landlords also has something to do with the rent control.

This applies in many cities with a tight housing market and states that the rent for an apartment may be a maximum of 10 percent above the local comparative rent.

Although the rental price brake theoretically also applies to furnished apartments, only a certain surcharge is allowed for the furniture.

In reality, however, more is often required, says Reiner Braun.

"The rental price brake is circumvented with furniture." In the absence of alternatives, tenants would repeatedly accept the high-priced offers.

But there is definitely demand for such apartments, the real estate expert emphasizes, referring to employees who only work temporarily in a city.

In Berlin last year, 39 percent of the rented apartments advertised were offered furnished, 61 percent unfurnished.

For comparison: in 2021 the ratio was still 17 percent furnished to 83 percent unfurnished.

The current figures in Stuttgart and Munich look similar to those in Berlin.

Only in Hamburg is the phenomenon of furnished apartments not quite as pronounced: there, 73 percent of the apartments were recently offered unfurnished and only 27 percent furnished.

"We don't have a housing shortage, but a housing shortage," states Braun.

Above all in the segment in which demand is particularly high – unfurnished, open-ended contracts, net cold rent of less than 10 euros per square meter – demand is far greater than supply.

He has little hope that the federal government's new building plans will change that.

Not all apartments are built where demand is high.

And "due to regulation" the new building is also very expensive.

The General Association of the German Housing Industry (GdW) is not very optimistic about the coming months.

Construction costs rose due to supply bottlenecks and high energy costs.

The situation is "dramatic," he warned on Monday, and affordable housing and construction are now almost impossible.

Almost two thirds (64 percent) of the socially oriented housing companies would have to postpone new construction projects, and almost a quarter (24 percent) would have to “completely abandon” planned buildings.

The prospects are not good for Kevin Kühnert's apartment search.