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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 la
by mrottenkolber 10y ago
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 10y agoSpending 70% of your income on rent is far from inevitable in Germany.
- LeChuck 10y agoNot 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 10y agoWell, 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 10y agoI 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.