Topic Real Estate and Housing

German Cities to See Further Rises in Housing Prices and Rents in 2013

Over the past few years, prices and rents for flats went up in most German cities. This trend is expected to continue in 2013. Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Frankfurt am Main will still see the highest increases in property prices and rents. In these cities, housing prices are rising much faster than rents. By contrast, stagnating or even falling prices are forecast for the cities in the Ruhr area. ...

Tax Incentives for Thermal Retrofits in Germany: Experiences from Practicioners

The building sector is a key focus area of the Energy Concept of the German Federal Government, among other reasons because it has the potential to avoid a large share of CO2 emissions while also saving costs. Thus far, however, only a small percentage of residential building owners have undertaken comprehensive thermal retrofits, and the target retrofit rate of 2% remains a distant goal. In order ...

Internet Offer Prices for Flats and Their Determinants: A Cross Section of Large European Cities

In this paper, we construct a data set of Internet offer prices for flats in 48 large European cities from 24 countries. The data are collected in January - April 2012 from 33 websites, where the advertisements of flats for sale are placed. Using these data we investigate the determinants of the flat prices. Four factors are found to be relevant for the flats' price level: income per capita, population ...

Location, Location, Location: Extracting Location Value from House Prices

The price for a single-family house depends both on the characteristics of the building and on its location. We propose a novel semiparametric method to extract location values from house prices. After splitting house prices into building and land components, location values are estimated with adaptive weight smoothing. The adaptive estimator requires neither strong smoothness assumptions nor local ...

An Early Warning System to Predict the Speculative House Price Bubbles

In this paper, the authors construct country-specific chronologies of house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q12009:Q4. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of fundamental and filter approaches. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one providing the highest concordance between these two techniques. In addition, the authors suggest an early warning ...

Explaining Reurbanization: Empirical Evidence of Intraregional Migration as a Long-Term Mobility Decision from Germany

Following the discussion on reurbanization (changing intra-regional migration patterns), our research project treats transport-related consequences of this spatial development in German city regions. The hypothesis is that reurbanization bears potential to spread environmentally friendly ways of organizing daily mobility - but that the chance ofthose positive effects might be given away, if policy ...

Germany's Construction Industry: Strong Growth Followed by Stagnation

2011 was one of the construction industry's strongest years of growth since German reunification. For the year as a whole, a nominal increase in construction volume of almost eight percent is expected. The price increase is forecast at over 2.5 percent. Real construction volume in 2011 will be over five percent higher than in 2010. However, according to current information, we can expect the construction ...

We Need Clarity on Financing Conditions: Five Questions to Hendrik Hagedorn

How Far Do Children Move? Spatial Distances after Leaving the Parental Home

Little is known about how far young adults move when they leave their parental home initially. We addressed this question using data from ten waves (2000 - 2009) of the German Socioeconomic Panel Study on spatial distances calculated by the geo-coordinates of residential moves (N = 1,425). Linear regression models predicted young adults· moving distance by factors at the individual, family, household, ...

Building the Minimum Wage: Germany's First Sectoral Minimum Wage and Its Impact on Wages in the Construction Industry

The very first minimum wage in Germany was introduced in 1997 for blue-collar workers in sub-sectors of the construction industry. In the setting of a natural experiment blue-collar workers in neighboring 4-digit-industries and white-collar workers are used as control groups for differences-in-differences-in-differences estimation based on linked employer-employee data. Estimation results reveal a ...