The market was a tenant's paradise and correspondongly bad for landlords… and then many landlords moved to a different market.
This has happened before, for example there have been cases where governments set the price of bread below productions costs, which pleased the poor people in the cities until the farmers and bakers reduced their production of the loss-making bread.
This article takes a typically political and ideological view of the situation.
Rent controls never solve issues, in fact they make them worse by doing the opposit of what would help (they reduce supply and increase demand, while the opposite is needed).
Here the market is simply finding a way around rent controls because the demand is so high vs. supply.
> The average rent across all flats in Berlin is €7.67 per sq metre.
Clearly that is not sustainable. That is laughably low rate for such city specially for German incomes. With that and say 50 sqm apartment I would expect average net income to be 1278 with the 30% income rule... Or bit more depending on what is included.
Could so have easily mentioned the UK where the same issues exist.
but chose not to.
Its easy to blame those damn Germans rather than focus what is going on at home.
isnt this called deflection
This is a classic example:
Back in the late 90's, wellafter all the social housing had been sold off and people were despecrate to find a home.
I had a phone call from a property management company asking if I would be interested in taking on a contract to maintain some of their property portfolio.
I went to see him at his very large home in Weybridge. that obscenely rich area.
He told me that he had just bought 19 properties at a local development in Feltham.
These properties were advertised as affordable housing for the local people.
But this guy, who had a lot of money bought 19 of them. How did this even happen?
He then rented out all these brand new properties for £1,600 per month mostly to staff from the Heathrow airport. Those tenants would then in effect be paying the mortgage this rich guy had taken out to buy the 19 properties.
netting him a very nice £30,400,00 rent payments each month or £364,800,00 per annum
I declined the contract