well you would have thought that after a while Germans should have realised that renting (long term is a mugs game). - Just entrenches the power of the elites.
It's not – at least in Germany. Laws prohibit intense rent hikes, thus you can lock in a low rent, with a delta to new leases that is just ever increasing.
Also, the idea to make everyone a landlord while widely accepted in housing economics to be a good thing, I happen to think is shortsighted and contradicts the principle of "economics of scale".
Housing companies (can be non-profit co-ops as well) often provide much more quality/€ to tenants than the landlord, who owns 1 flat and is always overstrained with the simplest maintnance requests.
> It's not – at least in Germany. Laws prohibit intense rent hikes, thus you can lock in a low rent, with a delta to new leases that is just ever increasing.
That's great in theory, but in practice has literally dozens of ways to be bypassed. Rents in Bavaria and Berlin have increased by nearly a quarter over these past 4 years.
One of the problems being that the Mietspiegel only accounts for new rentals, with steady increases in rent prices, it does not reflect the actual "average rent prices" because it's missing data for people who've been living in the same place for years and up to decades, with the same low rent.
You‘re comparing apples to oranges. Or in that case existing to new leases.
The latter has way more room for increase than the former - by law. Add to that, that owners often stop bothering increasing rents for longterm tenants (because the allowed increase is the more miniscule the more years pass by) and concentrate on hikes for new leases.
It's not like people had or have much of a choice, buying property ain't cheap in Germany, at least outside of completely underdeveloped and remote areas. Even reasonably wealthy people usually have to finance it through a extra credit.
Also ain't helping that over these past decades incomes have stagnated while job security got way worse, so people are less likely to commit to such long-term liabilities.
Also, the idea to make everyone a landlord while widely accepted in housing economics to be a good thing, I happen to think is shortsighted and contradicts the principle of "economics of scale".
Housing companies (can be non-profit co-ops as well) often provide much more quality/€ to tenants than the landlord, who owns 1 flat and is always overstrained with the simplest maintnance requests.