German housing market

[mindstalk]

2011 link: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/06/how-germany-achieved-stable-and-affordable-housing.html

Germany has a rental dominated housing market, with stable prices. Features:

* constitution protects right-to-build: if there's not an explicit rule against, you can build, no need for permission.
* local gov't gets grants based on # of inhabitants, so they have an incentive to encourage development.
* strong tenant protections, including what sounds like rent control, constrained rent increases. Between that and the majority doing it, renting is seen as a first-class choice.
* tight mortgage financing.

Article contrasts with the UK, with lots of fiddling restriction on building, deregulate and landlord-favoring market so renting is second-class choice, easy mortgage credit. Tight supply, easy credit, propensity to panic buying. So basically a factory for making market bubbles.

Comments

[heron61]

Interesting. I wondered about overall US real house prices over time, and found this, which indicates (to my surprise) that the UK is far worse overall than the US, and even Portland OR has a much less volatile and messed up real estate market than the UK. In fact, looking at the graphs, the UK overall housing market is most similar to San Francisco, which is pretty much the worst place to try to find reasonably prices housing in the entire nation.

I am also intrigued that while nowhere near as good as Germany, Portland's housing prices have had all that much of a boom and bust cycle, despite having a very firm urban growth boundary. It will be interesting to see how this goes in the future, since both Portland and to an only slightly lesser extent, Oregon as a while has recently been enacting (much overdue) tenant's rights laws.