Überhöhte Mieten, hohe Zinsen und mangelndes Angebot führen zu einer europäischen Immobilienkrise

11 comments

1. Article:

   **Soaring costs across the EU are pricing out renters, deterring prospective buyers and preventing new homes from being built. As Europe’s housing crisis grows, so do homelessness rates across the bloc. What are the solutions to Europe’s housing crisis?**

   The month of September is always a busy time for the rental market in Paris. As students return to the city after the summer break, demand for lower-priced accommodation soars.

   But in 2023, renters looking for a cheap room or studio faced a tougher challenge than ever. The French capital is now the second-most-expensive city in the EU – behind Dublin – for renters (at €28.50 per square metre per month), according to an annual Deloitte study published in August.

   In cities across Europe, rising rents coupled with soaring costs for energy and food are forcing people to adapt to living conditions, particularly the young.

   Across the 27 EU member states, more than a quarter of Europeans between 15 and 29 years old reported living in overcrowded conditions in 2022. In Ireland, 30% of 18- to 24-year-olds were still living with their parents in 2022 – an almost 10% increase in five years.

   But it is not just Europe’s young renters who are feeling the squeeze. As rents in Paris, Berlin and Lisbon have reached unprecedented highs, interest rates on mortgages have also risen across the bloc, driving up costs for homeowners with variable rate mortgages and pricing out many potential buyers altogether.

   In the Paris region, property sales fell 23% in the second trimester of 2023. Left unable to buy due to high interest rates, large numbers of aspiring homeowners are now putting extra pressure on the strained rental market.

   The crisis has been decades in the making, said Ruth Owen, deputy director at FEANTSA, a European federation of national organisations working with the homeless based in Brussels.

   “There is a fundamental structural issue which is that housing costs have been rising faster than incomes for decades in the European Union, and that trend has accelerated in many places,” Owen said. “It means that households are very vulnerable when there are any kind of external shocks.”

   In the decade up to 2022, average rents increased by 19% in the EU and house prices by 47%, according to Housing Europe, an umbrella organisation that works with groups providing public, cooperative and social housing in EU countries.

   And in recent years, external shocks have been plentiful: Covid-19, a European energy crisis prompted by the war in Ukraine and a global cost-of-living crisis have all contributed to worsening conditions throughout the housing market.

   **Lack of supply**

   There is little hope for quick improvement. The European Central Bank (ECB) raised its key interest rate to a record-high 4% in mid-September and interest rates will stay high for “as long as necessary” to beat back inflation, ECB chief Christine LaGarde said at the end of that month.

   Housing supply is also at risk. As demand for homes has fallen, home construction across the eurozone has slowed to its lowest rate since April 2020, exacerbated by high building costs and supply-chain issues first caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and exacerbated by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

2. Sounds eerily similar to the US

3. Is there a developed nation not going through a housing crisis right now?

4. And yet they still accept mass immigration……

5. Phew, I almost thought I’d miss out on my 44th once in a lifetime global financial crisis.

   If only the ultra-rich didn’t need to make us all hear the word “crisis” nonstop, so that when the real financial death-rattle comes out, we’ll have missed the opportunities to equalize some of the wealth gap.

6. Inflated rents? More like price gouging

7. Trudeau’s monetary policy leaking into France

8. When the whole modem economy is built solely on a single number: interest rate (fed rate or whatever people call in their country), it is doomed since day one.

   At the moment, the less a country relies on loans, the less it is experiencing housing problem.

9. The fault is when European people refused skyscrapers during the 1900. They hated the design of the tall buildings and preferred the old style of architecture.

   Now we are stuck with 5 decks of houses instead of 25 decks of houses , again is the new generation that are paying the decision of the old generations

10. All according to plans of our global ~~elite~~ owners. Keep the poor class desperate and clinging to survival so they will take any and all working conditions and low pay. Meanwhile they make away like bandits.

    We are going to see either substantial changes, or open revolts before this is over. Sadly the elite don’t seem to care at all.

11. In 10 years, I bet the story is going to be foreign capital flows out of China into real estate globally being a major, major part of the story. The other part of course the far more banal explanation that cheap interest rates lead to giant entities looking for real assets ahead of future inflation.