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 ...

Noise Expectation and House Prices

In this paper, we examine the effects of an airport expansion on the prices of houses and flats located under the planned flight corridors. We focus on the role of expectations about the exposure to noise and find that proximity to the planned corridors significantly reduces real estate prices in the affected areas, by around 41% to 60%, depending on the sample. Hereby, the various plans of expanding ...

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 ...

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 ...

Internet-Based Hedonic Indices of Rents and Prices for Flats: Example of Berlin

In this paper, we suggest to estimate the home rents and prices in German regions/cities using the data from Internet ads offering the housing for rent and sale. Given the richness of information contained in the ads, we are able to construct the quality-adjusted rent and price indices using the hedonic approach. The results can be applied both for investigating the dynamics of rents/prices and for ...

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 ...

Forecasting the Prices and Rents for Flats in Large German Cities

In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the monthly growth rates of the prices and rents for flats in 26 largest German cities. Given the small time dimension, the forecasts are done in a panel-data format. In addition, we use panel models that account for spatial dependence between the growth rates of housing prices and rents. Using a quasi out-of-sample forecasting exercise, we find that both ...

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