Buying your own home: Cheap houses are only available in the countryside – study

Utopian prices

Even high earners can no longer afford a house here

Where in Germany is owning a home still affordable – and where is it long out of reach? A new analysis shows surprising winners and the known losers.

According to a study by the economic research institute IW, anyone looking for a cheap single-family home in Germany Cologne can only be found in rural areas and in structurally weak regions. In a comparison of the sixteen federal states, homes are cheapest in Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein and Saxony-Anhalt.

A typical model household has to spend an average of a quarter of its net income on the monthly installment of the real estate loan. Being at the other end of the scale BerlinBavaria and Hamburgwhere the repayment of the real estate loan consumes on average around forty percent of the net income or more. This was announced by the financing intermediary Interhyp, which commissioned the study from the Cologne economists.

In the “affordability index,” monthly expenses for the property of up to 35 percent of net income are considered affordable. In the index, this value is marked by the number 100. The further the index is below 100, the less affordable the property is, the higher it is above 100, the more affordable it is.

The nationwide average value is 103, but the regional price differences are immense. Not surprisingly: In addition to what has been known to be expensive for decades Munich The six other largest German cities and their surrounding areas are also in the rather unaffordable range of the index.

The situation is different in smaller cities and their neighboring districts, where, according to the study, a model household has to spend on average around a third of its income on paying off the single-family home and is therefore still within the affordability formula.

But the average prices in the states also sometimes conceal large regional differences: single-family homes are most easily affordable in the Steinburg district in Schleswig-Holstein (index value 187) and in the Rhön-Grabfeld district, Bavaria’s northernmost district in Lower Franconia (184). There, buying a house consumes less than a fifth of the assumed model household’s net income.

For the majority, however, a home on the other side of the country is unaffordable Garmisch-Partenkirchen with an index value of 53. On the edge of the Upper Bavarian Alps, even the moderately well-off model household would have to spend two thirds of its net income on the monthly rate. Garmisch is not alone: ​​The top ten of the ten most expensive municipalities and cities are all occupied by Munich and the districts around the Bavarian capital and in the foothills of the Alps.