It's such a thing with asking prices on the real estate market.

When Internet portals evaluate the prices at which houses and apartments are offered in advertisements, this does not always have to correspond exactly to the actual price development in the transactions, i.e. purchases and sales.

Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that there are increasing signals from such sources that the rise in prices for residential real estate in Germany will not continue unabated.

The Internet portal Immowelt reported on Tuesday that the offers in seven out of 14 observed major cities in the second quarter had not gone up with the prices of existing apartments.

Prices remained stable in three major cities, while slight declines were observed in four others.

Christian Siedenbiedel

Editor in Business.

  • Follow I follow

In Munich, for example, there was a slight drop in apartment prices to an average of EUR 9,551 per square meter.

In Düsseldorf they fell by 1 percent to 5206 euros, in Leipzig also by 1 percent to 2693 euros.

In Hanover they fell by 2 percent to 4019 euros.

Prices remained stable in Frankfurt at EUR 6,554, Cologne at EUR 5,348 and Essen at EUR 2,954 per square metre.

On the other hand, there were price increases in Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Bremen, Dresden and Dortmund.

The index of the credit brokerage platform Europace, which is based on construction financing actually brokered, had already signaled a slowdown in price dynamics for May - for all three segments, new single and two-family houses, existing houses and condominiums.

Was there already a turning point in the second quarter?

The latest official figures available are those from the Federal Statistical Office for the first quarter.

The office reported a slight price increase of 0.8 percent compared to the previous quarter and a significant increase of 12 percent compared to the same quarter of the previous year.

But the statisticians were already talking about a “weakening of the momentum”.

You will see more in the figures for the second quarter, says Michael Voigtländer, real estate expert from the German Economic Institute (IW).

"In the second quarter we should see a turnaround on the real estate market," said Voigtländer in an interview: "It is clear that with rapidly rising interest rates, more and more groups of buyers are falling out of the market."

After all, building interest rates have risen significantly since the beginning of the year.

From less than 1 percent at the turn of the year, they increased to 3.29 percent for building loans with a ten-year fixed interest rate, as reported by FMH-Finanzberatung.

Rising building interest tends to slow down the development of real estate prices - even if these also depend on many other factors, in particular of course supply and demand for living space.

Rent or buy?

The real estate price situation varies greatly from region to region.

In a study that was exclusively available to the FAZ in advance, the Postbank, together with the Hamburg institute for world economics HWWI, used the average real estate prices from the past year to examine where buying and renting in the different parts of Germany is particularly expensive or cheap - and where things are more likely to be worth it.