Is the landlord obligated to renew the lease at the end in perpetuity? Or does the landlord just need to wait for the lease to expire and then choose to not renew?
in germany by law every lease for private homes is always in perpetuity. the concept of renewal does not even exist. it is always month to month until the tenant decides to move out. you can't not renew a lease. you can raise the rent, but only in small steps. exceptions are if the tenant fails to pay for a few months, damages the property or misbehaves in other ways.
That sounds like a really awful law, TBH. I would never rent to someone if it meant that I was powerless to decide to end the relationship. I'm all for protecting tenants to some extent, but that law strikes me as abusive of the landowner.
i don't agree that it is abuse of the landowner, but you also have to consider that in germany private landowners renting out are extremely rare. always have been.
maintaining rental properties was always a business.
as an individual home owner i would also not want to rent out either unless there are exceptional circumstances. but german cities do not have suburbs like in the US, and any popular area will build up multi tenant apartment blocks. people owning their own house are out in the countryside where noone wants to rent anyways. and any multitenant building is by definition a business. and that's the majority of all rental properties in germany.
you have to keep in mind that germany has the highest ratio of people renting vs owning. renting has become our culture. with so many people renting, laws have to be strict, otherwise we would have chaos. austria is similar. my mother in vienna lives in an apartment that has been rented by someone in our family since 150 years ago.
> any multitenant building is by definition a business
Not inherently so, at least in the US. Lots of multi-family structures in the US have multiple independent owners of their own spaces. Townhouses, condos, and the like are often a collection of individually owned spaces with their own deeds and property rights. There is usually a shared organization, such as an HOA, that is in charge of the management of the joint property. This isn't really a "business" though, it doesn't look to make a profit and is chaired by residents.
As an American it just seems strange to me to have people paying a corporation for the same home for 150 years and still have no real ownership stake in it. Like, over 150 years, wouldn't your family have paid many, many times the actual value of the property?