The relaxation on the housing market promised by politicians for many years is still a long time coming.

Recently, the already low vacancy rates in the conurbations have fallen even further.

In shrinking regions, on the other hand, more and more properties are vacant, as a yet unpublished study by the analysis company Empirica shows.

The real estate market is split in two, states CEO Reiner Braun.

"If things continue like this, we'll soon have 0.0 percent vacancies in the big cities."

Julia Loehr

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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In total, around 607,000 apartments were empty in Germany at the end of 2021 - these are the most recent figures that have now been compiled.

These numbers are “market-active vacancies”: apartments that someone could move into immediately, not dilapidated properties.

In the previous year the figure was 611,000.

The vacancy rate is unchanged at 2.8 percent.

Usually, the real estate market in a city or county is considered tight when the vacancy rate is below 2 percent.

However, the German average is not very meaningful.

The division into east and west is even more revealing: in east Germany excluding Berlin, the average was 6.2 percent, significantly higher than in the west, at 2.1 percent.

Saxony-Anhalt had the highest vacancy rate among the federal states at 8.1 percent, followed by Saxony (6.6 percent) and Thuringia (6.1 percent).

In contrast, the lowest vacancy rates were in the city states of Hamburg (0.4 percent) and Berlin (0.8 percent), followed by Bavaria (1.2 percent) and Baden-Württemberg (1.3 percent).

When looking at city-level values, the gap widens even further.

In Munich, only 0.2 percent of the apartments were vacant at the end of 2021 - just as many or few as in 2016. In Frankfurt, the vacancy rate fell from 0.5 to 0.3 percent, the same applies to Münster and Freiburg.

In Ingolstadt, the situation is hardly better with 0.4 percent vacancy.

On the other hand, those looking for a flat are free to choose in Pirmasens, Frankfurt/Oder and Chemnitz: the vacancy rate there was 9 percent or more.

In other words, about every eleventh apartment in these cities is empty.

In the analysis at the end of last year, it still looked like a trend reversal.

In 2020, the vacancy rate no longer only increased in rural regions, but also in some growth regions for the first time since 2006.

However, the hope of a relaxation in the coveted “swarm cities”, to which many people are drawn, did not last long.

"There is less construction and there is more immigration again," Braun explains the renewed tightening.

The analysis house belongs to the group of "real estate experts" who annually prepare a report of several hundred pages for the federal government.

The traffic light coalition had actually set itself the goal of alleviating the housing shortage in large and medium-sized cities with a new building offensive.

Instead of the last 300,000, 400,000 apartments are to be built each year.

For the first time since the late 1990s, Germany has its own building ministry, headed by the SPD politician Klara Geywitz.

However, the trend is currently going in exactly the opposite direction.

According to the Federal Statistical Office, between January and September the number of building permits fell by 3.7 percent compared to the same period last year.

The central association of the housing industry (GdW) even says that 70 percent of all planned projects are completely canceled or postponed for a long time.

By 2024, 60,000 new apartments would be on the brink in rental housing alone.

Project developers cite the sharp rise in material costs and the rise in interest on mortgage loans as the main reasons.

The shortage of craftsmen would do the rest to spoil the desire to build for builders.

Single-family homes for owner-occupiers would probably be completed most likely, Empirica boss Braun suspects.

For multi-family houses, on the other hand, the calculation hardly works anymore.

“Instead of 16 or 17 euros cold rent per square meter, they should be rented for 20 to 22 euros.

Who is going to pay for that?”

Despite the disrupted supply chains caused by Corona and the Ukraine war: Politicians definitely have opportunities to eliminate the bottlenecks on the housing market, says Braun.

"The main problem is still the lack of building land." Cities like Cologne and Bonn would afford it out of "green ignorance".

“Instead of designating building land, people should live in smaller areas.

But what is the result: People move out, live in a single-family house instead of in an apartment and commute to the city,” says Braun.

That is not climate-friendly.

"Not in the Harz Mountains or the Bavarian Forest"

The hopes of some real estate experts at the beginning of the corona pandemic that the new home office options could bring life back to rural areas have not been fulfilled, according to Empirica figures.

“Yes, more people are moving to the outskirts of the cities.

But not in the Harz Mountains or the Bavarian Forest,” says Braun.

From his point of view, the most sensible thing would be for nothing new to be built in regions with shrinking populations.

In view of the incalculable costs of renovating vacant existing buildings, however, this can hardly be enforced politically.

A few days ago, the building ministers of the federal states warned the federal government not to focus too much on social housing.

Sufficient funding is also needed for new buildings that are not subject to occupancy and rent restrictions.

Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) has severely reduced the corresponding funding from KfW.

From 2023, there should only be 1 billion euros a year for energy-efficient new buildings, compared to 13 billion euros for renovations.