The federal government wants to build 400,000 apartments per year. For 2022 and 2023, Minister of Construction Geywitz has already received the goal and only gives hope for 2024. The Vonovia group has meanwhile announced that it does not want to start any projects at all this year.
The real estate giant Vonovia is pulling the ripcord because of the rising construction costs and interest rates and stopping all new buildings planned for this year. "We will not have any new construction projects starting this year. Inflation and interest rates have risen enormously and we cannot close our eyes to that," Vonovia CEO Daniel Riedl told the "Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung". Plans in Berlin and Dresden are particularly affected.
"For properties that we used to be able to offer for twelve euros per square meter without rent, we would now have to go towards 20 euros in order to recoup our costs of 5,000 euros per square meter," said Riedl. These rents are "completely unrealistic" in large parts of Germany. In order to cover the nationwide demand of 700,000 apartments, rents of eight or nine euros are also necessary. The federal government must intervene and provide clear funding guidelines and promote the digitization of building applications.
In November, Vonovia boss Rolf Buch had already reduced the investments for the new building to around 350 million euros below the previous year's values, referring to the increased costs. The general manager of the main association of the German construction industry, Tim-Oliver Müller, had recently warned that the urgently needed new housing construction would be slowed down by the cost explosion. "Many projects were initially put on hold or even cancelled," he said.
Federal Building Minister Klara Geywitz believes that the new government target of 400,000 apartments per year can only be realistically achieved from 2024. "I don't assume that the number of 400,000 apartments can be reached in 2022 and 2023," she said recently in an interview with the "Web.de News" portal.
From the point of view of the industry, people looking for apartments will probably have a hard time in many places for years to come. The federal government is doing too little to achieve its goal in housing construction, criticized the president of the landlords' association GdW, Axel Gedaschko, in the "Bild" newspaper. "It is not possible to simply build 400,000 new homes per year from scratch. The housing shortage will therefore last for at least another ten years."
The Federal Association of German Housing and Real Estate Companies (GdW) primarily represents cooperatives and municipal housing companies, but also listed industry giants such as Vonovia. Gedaschko demanded plots of land that could be built on from the federal and state governments, as well as grants and low-interest loans for the construction.
