Topic Real Estate and Housing

Limited Price Competition Among Real Estate Agents and the Role of Inattention

This paper relates incomplete price competition among real estate agents to inattentive home sellers. I exploit a recent legal reform in Germany which specifically aimed to increase price competition among real estate agents by raising the cost salience of sellers. I find that the reform backfired and real estate agents exploited the transition to increase their total commission rate by 0.3...

Accelerate thermal modernization of buildings with minimum standards for buildings and binding retrofitting targets

The energy and climate crisis enhance the need for energy savings. In the building sector, these savings can be achieved primarily through thermal retrofitting. So far, progress in this area has been slow. To date, less than one percent of the residential building stock in Germany is retrofitted each year. The existing support programs alone offer too little reliability for the necessary...

The Housing Market in Public and Political Debate - a Text Analysis

Inflation is pushing real construction volume into negative territory

Social Policy or Crowding-out? Tenant Protection in Comparative Long-run Perspective

Private rental markets have become increasingly important since the Global Financial Crisis 2008–2009 and rent controls are back on the political agenda. Yet, they have received less attention from housing scholars than homeownership and public housing. This paper presents new data on the development of private tenancy legislation based on a content-coding of rent control, protection of tenants from ...

Rent Price Control – Yet Another Great Equalizer of Economic Inequalities? Evidence from a Century of Historical Data

The long-run U-shaped patterns of economic inequality are standardly explained by basic economic trends (Piketty’s r > g), taxation policies or ‘great levellers’ such as catastrophes. This article argues that housing policy, and particularly rent control, is a neglected explanatory factor in understanding macro inequality. We hypothesize that rent control could decrease overall housing wealth, lower ...

Construction Boom Coming to an End; Change in Policy Strategy Needed

Following the construction boom of recent years in Germany, inflation and supply bottlenecks hit the industry hard in 2022. While nominal construction volume increased by nearly 14 percent, it decreased by two percent when adjusted for inflation. Residential construction, which is urgently needed, was particularly affected. In 2023 and 2024, it is expected that investors will show restraint and that ...

Rent Control, Market Segmentation, and Misallocation: Causal Evidence from a Large-Scale Policy Intervention

This paper studies market segmentation that arises from the introduction of rent control. When a part of the market remains unregulated, theory predicts an increase of free-market rents due to the misallocation of households to dwellings. To document this mechanism empirically, we study a large-scale policy intervention in the German housing market. We isolate the misallocation mechanism by exploiting ...

The Rise and Fall of Social Housing? Housing Decommodification in Long-run Comparison

The comparative study of housing decommodification lags behind classical welfare state research, while housing research itself is rich in homeownership studies but lacks comparative accounts of private and social rentals due to missing comparative data. Building on existing works and various primary sources, this study presents a new collection of up to forty-eight countries’ social housing shares ...

Forward to the Past: Short-Term Effects of the Rent Freeze in Berlin

In 2020, Berlin introduced a rigorous rent-control policy responding to soaring prices by capping rents: the Mietendeckel (rent freeze). The German Constitutional Court revoked the policy only one year later. Although successful in lowering rents during its duration, the consequences for Berlin’s rental market and close-by markets are per se not clear. This article evaluates the short-term causal supply-side ...