[mrottenkolber]

Germany is a two-class society divided into landlords and renters. A landlord will usually not own only one but ~3-20 houses that total to ~15-100 flats. The landlords often are renters themselves.

When compared with big housing companies, private landlords require bigger profit margins, leading to low quality maintenance of existing houses and ex-orbital rents. Especially in crowded cities, rent regulation is non existent and its a sellers market, inflated by wealthy students that rent expensive micro-flats during university.

You or your parents don’t own houses, and are self sufficient on a regular job? Well, you are shit out of luck then. As much as 70% of your income will go towards your rent, effectively financing the better-off and the further expansion of their inefficient renting businesses.

[fwn]

Spending 70% of your income on rent is far from inevitable in Germany.

[LeChuck]

Not only far from inevitable but impossible in a lot of cases. When I was looking for an apartment in Germany most (all? I can't remember) landlords wanted to verify that my income was at least three times the rent.

[mrottenkolber]

Well, that can’t work out in all cases, obviously. Remember that a significant chunk of the people don’t make 3x of a low rent in many towns.

[mrottenkolber]

I wrote “as much as.” So this varies from town to village, and how much income you have. So of course for some rich people it will be 10%, but I would guess for most its ~50% (living quality / income trade-off), while you really want it to be below 15% for a decent flat.