Comments on: Why German property hasn’t risen in value

By: k.d.

k.d. — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 07:07:09 +0000

haha, no! not at all.

By: Howard

Howard — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 14:46:35 +0000

So the previous lot did better?

By: k.d.

k.d. — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 13:39:00 +0000

“despite the current Große Koalition, there seems to be little chance that things will change in the near future”

replace “despite” with “because of” and it makes more sense…

By: Howard

Howard — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 12:24:04 +0000

The house-with-leaking-roof story was from about 20 years ago (it wasnt ours – it was a house rented by a friend….).

When we bought out house in 1989 it was 10 years old. We didnt want to build a new house having the perception that the costs can get out of control & builders go bust….. It seems that you have to “project manage” the whole thing yourself – and my wife wasnt prepared to do that with a young baby in her arms. Now this “baby” is 17 years old & almost as tall as I

Aprt from a crack in wall which hasnt changed as long as we have been here the house ssems OK (touching Holz as they say).
My wife does the decorating Having assisted on several occasions I must say the the walls are astonishingly true….

By: John

John — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 20:02:48 +0000

I think the building quality thing is fairly recent – we had zero defects with our house in Munich, which we bought new.

Here in Frankfurt we bought a two year old house, thinking all the little bugs would have been ironed out. Big mistake – the quality is abysmal. The hall/landing lights wired up wrong, walls out of plumb, door frames mounted out of alignment, second-quality tiles used on the stairs, leaks in the roof of an alcove in the lounge and in the bedroom, and, and, and. Really ‘Jerry built’. It’s surprising what we missed when we looked round originally, having bought and sold 3 houses in the UK before we came here. We found out after we had moved in, that the builders had gone bust and disappeared, so we never had any of the things fixed at their expense either… Next time if we buy a used house, it gets a full survey, even if it’s only a few months old!

By: Howard

Howard — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 10:09:04 +0000

I was in the USA last two weeks June or so. Whereas the nightly TV entertainment in Germany offers not
much more than naked ladies & mobile telephone downloads, the US offers quick methods of loosing
weight (true – they need that) and making money (usually in Real estate)..

I saw one program which seemed to have grains of truth. The guy was saying that houses dont go
up in value – its the currency that goes DOWN.

I also wonder why the German building industry is in poor state – one often hears of builders
going bust during construction of friend’s houses & also having to come back to fix things.
The only house I have seen with a badly leaking roof was in Hamburg (& it wasnt old).
Houses here DO look more solid than most of UK housing…....

We too borrowed more that 60% (was about 70% I recall) but its paid back
German finance market is well closed-up: witness fact that banks charge for
everything & I never paid anything for my Uk account for normal usage.

We were lucky – we had a friend as bank manager who organised the loan….....