Unchecked in the rental crisis

Rental prices in NRW rose even more in 2022 than in previous years. NRW building minister Scharrenbach still rejects a tightening of the rental price brake.

The situation on the housing market has worsened again in many cities in North Rhine-Westphalia in the past year. This is shown by new figures from the real estate data service Empirica, which are available to the WDR magazine Westpol.

Accordingly, the increase in rents has accelerated again, especially in the already tense metropolitan areas along the Rhine – and this despite the rental price brake in force there.

Rent plus of more than ten percent – in one year

According to the evaluated data, rents in the city of Alfter near Bonn rose by another 12 percent in 2022. That is almost three times the average for the last ten years. The average rent per square meter in Alfter was 10.20 euros.

The development in Pulheim near Cologne was just as extreme: an increase of 11 percent in rents. The price per square meter shot up to over 11 euros. Rents rose less sharply in 2022 in the cities of Cologne (+5%), Düsseldorf (+5%), Bonn (+6%) and Münster (+5%), but here too the increase was higher than in the 10-year Average.

Instead of buying or building, people continue to rent

According to experts, the main reason for the worsening development is that the conditions for building new homes and buying real estate have deteriorated so much: sharply increased prices for building materials and sharply increased interest rates on loans. Construction projects are stopped or postponed.

“As a result, the demand is now shifting from the owner-occupied home market to the rental apartment market,” says Prof. Michael Voigtländer, an economist at the Institute of German Economics in Cologne. People who are solvent and actually wanted to buy would now continue to rent: “That’s what drives rents.”

The rental price brake, which applies in 18 cities in NRW, hardly seems to be able to dampen the development. In practice, apparently only a few tenants make use of this – they would have to prove to their landlord after moving in that the rent is more than 10 percent higher than what is customary for such an apartment in the area.

In addition, landlords seem to be increasingly looking for ways to circumvent the rental price brake, for example by renting out furnished apartments. The “Mietenmonitor” portal has calculated that around a quarter of all new rentals in Düsseldorf violate the rent control.

NRW building minister does not want to tighten the rental price brake

The responsible NRW building minister Ina Scharrenbach does not want to tighten the rental price brake. She fears creating “a bureaucracy monster” if local authorities should control individual leases in the future.

However, Scharrenbach does not see any other short-term opportunities to counteract this either: “There are sometimes times, and I hate to say that, when things are the way they are.” There is now a “toxic mixture”, the scenario of a rental catastrophe in North Rhine-Westphalia has “already happened in parts”, there are hardly any vacancies.

SPD demands state housing association

What the state government can do will be done, said Scharrenbach in the Westpol interview. Their main goal is to ensure investment security by promoting new housing construction. 1.6 billion euros are available for this this year: “But that will only have an effect in the future.”

“The minister is now being overtaken by what the state government failed to do in the past,” countered Sebastian Watermeier, a member of the SPD state parliament. Scharrenbach should have promoted housing construction much earlier and with more money, also with a state-owned housing construction company, “politically controlled where the housing markets are most tense”.

Scharrenbach, on the other hand, sharply criticizes the federal government. This has caused the industry to be extremely unsettled by the change in the funding criteria. The principle that apartments must also be affordable has been abandoned: “The federal government is thus dividing society into those who can still afford it and those who can no longer afford it.”

Scharrenbach responded to the demand for affordable living space, created with a state-owned housing association, in the “Current Hour”: “It is always presented as if the state of North Rhine-Westphalia had vacant properties that would simply be available for development. That is not the case across the board,” said the minister. In addition, NRW has no shortage of people willing to build but a significant increase in construction costs. “Financing costs are exploding across the board, both for families who would like to create property and for housing associations,” Scharrenbach continued.

Those: wdr.de