In Berlin, the asking rents for apartments for first-time and re-letting rose by almost 44 percent from 2015 to 2021 – from 8.52 euros to 12.23 euros per square meter of living space cold. This emerges from the response of the federal government to a request from the Bundestag member Caren Lay (left). Berlin has almost reached the level of Hamburg, where asking rents rose by almost 25 percent to EUR 12.52 per square meter in the same period. The highest absolute increase was determined for Munich, where asking rents increased by an average of EUR 4.69 per square meter in the period under review – to EUR 19.27 per square meter of living space.
Berlin has already overtaken Cologne, where asking rents averaged EUR 12.16 per square meter last year, which corresponds to an increase of almost 26 percent since 2015. The asking rents in Frankfurt am Main (EUR 14.22 per square meter) and in Stuttgart (EUR 14.44) are higher than in Berlin.
New construction drives up prices
In its response, the federal government refers to an evaluation by the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR), which included rental offers for unfurnished apartments with a size of 40 to 100 square meters in medium to good locations. The offers come from databases with advertisements from more than 120 real estate portals and newspapers that the BBSR has evaluated. The database is thus significantly broader than when looking at a single real estate portal, but even with this a complete market coverage is not possible. According to the response from the federal government, apartments in the low-cost rental segment in particular could be underrepresented. Important: These are rental offers. It does not appear at what rents the apartments were finally awarded. Rents in current contracts are not included in the evaluation.
“The strong increase in asking rents makes it clear once again that the rental price brake does not offer sufficient protection for tenants,” says Left MP Lay. “This rally on the housing market must finally come to an end.” The traffic light must intervene consistently in tenancy law. A rent freeze is urgently needed.
If one only considers the development of rents in the case of re-letting, the picture is not quite as dramatic. Because the expensive first rentals of new apartments are not taken into account. According to the BBSR 2021, the average re-letting rent for advertised apartments in Berlin was 11.67 euros per square meter of living space – 56 cents less than including new apartments in first occupancy.