Housing in Germany - suddenly there are not enough three million apartments in Germany.

Germany has too few apartments anyway. New research now shows that again 300,000 are required annually - for foreign specialists. If construction fails, the central German competitive factor is in jeopardy.

Those who work must also live somewhere. This simple statement could spark a construction boom, but whether this will happen is still questionable. The consulting firm RWI Consult, part of the Essen RWI-Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, calculated housing needs in Germany by 2035 in one study.

Unlike previous forecasts, which took into account, first of all, demographic development, the Essen researchers also took into account future immigration as a result of demographic development. Thus, in the next 14 years a year, from 223,000 to 297,000 additional apartments will be required to accommodate the projected attraction of specialists from abroad.

The Pestel Institute in Hanover has calculated the annual need for 400,000 new apartments until 2025. The federal government has set itself the goal of building over 350,000 apartments. In fact, the construction industry created about 300,000 new apartments last year - the highest annual rate in two decades.

The Federal Institute for Building, Urban and Space Research (BBSR) has calculated the need for new construction for the entire federal territory at 230,000 housing units per year from 2015 to 2030. To do this, it was necessary to do the same again or more in order to meet the actual needs for housing in Germany.

Because add to that the labor market implications, aging and associated labor market entrances and therefore the growing need for immigration in the coming decade, according to RWI Consult. So about half a million apartments a year may be needed, it is conservatively calculated.

Be attractive to qualified professionals

"Companies are likely to increase their efforts to compensate for unmet labor demand by increasing immigration in the future," the study authors write to Christoph M. Schmidt, president of the Leibniz RWI. The study was created on behalf of Fact AG, a real estate investment firm.

The creation of conditions for this and, above all, the attractiveness for immigration of qualified specialists, thus, will become a central competitive factor for individual economic spaces and regions, as well as Germany as a whole. “An important building block will be the issue of affordable and livable housing in Germany,” says Schmidt.

Depending on the low intensity of immigration as a result of demographic changes in 2035, purely computationally, there will be three to four million fewer workers than today. It is to be expected - as has often been observed in the past - that the pent-up demand for local labor will lead to a wage adjustment of the more scarce productive factor, leading to a drop in labor demand.

“In particular, because of these bottlenecks, companies are expected to leverage new technological capabilities associated with the keywords 'digitization' and 'artificial intelligence' to switch their productivity processes,” the study authors write. “That being said, highly skilled workers are likely to receive even higher marks, while low and medium skills will be under pressure.”

"An existential question for our national economy"

In addition to natural demographic shifts, other trends will affect the labor market: for example, an increase in the share of the labor force of women, and a decrease in the propensity to leave the labor market prematurely. In addition, Germany has long been a clean country of immigration, so workers who have retired from working life have been partially replaced.

According to the RWI study, given the need for immigration of just under 300,000 workers, which is not yet accounted for in today's migration assumptions, the need for housing in Germany will also increase significantly. "Eventually, baby boomers will leave the job market, but not the housing market." Thus, if the German labor market can successfully attract large numbers of foreign workers, there will be a significant additional demand for housing construction.

Real estate service provider JLL also expects the number of households and therefore apartments to grow by 2035. Only by reducing the average household size can the number of households grow, even if the population as a whole is declining.

Housing is becoming an existential issue for our economy,” says Hubert Schulte-Kemper, CEO of Fact AG. In the next ten to twelve years, up to ten million workers from Europe may be needed. And if we assume that the average real estate agent in denham courtfamily that then comes to Germany consisted of three or four people, then our population is likely to grow to well over 100 million.

Schulte-Kemper: “This means nothing more than the fact that the conjuncture is again making a significant leap forward due to population growth. And it also means that the demographic factor, which should be so disastrous for the relationship between workers and retirees, is finally falling into the moth's box.