The Rental Story

Over the past decade, two unusual events have come to arrive in Germany, and created some anger and frustrations.

First, affordable housing in most urbanized areas is becoming non-existent.  If you drive around Frankfurt and look for something in the 500 to 800 Euro range....you will find that it's fairly hard to find empty apartments.

Second, second-home 'owners' are now becoming noticed.  No one says the numbers that existed prior to the 1990s....but in the past decade, it's become apparent that people have a primary residence and a secondary residence.  Some of this is due to purchases made two decades ago by people who were single....now they've married or they've moved into an apartment to share with their partner.  So if you look on-line for 'holiday'rentals'.....there are roughly 1,500 situations around Frankfurt now.

So, naturally, the Frankfurt city-government wants to get involved in this, and stop it (the rentals of second-home owners).

HR does a good job of telling this story.

The humor side of this is that even if you took away the 1,500 second-home situations....statistically, it'd only amount to one-quarter of one percent of the homes/residences....in Frankfurt.

I suspect that this will get dragged into some court and the question for the judges to decide....where does property reach the level of being government-controlled yet personally-owned.  The hint here by the city management folks is that they don't want anyone to rent out residence (actual apartments) to the holiday crowd.  If you look at the trend.....there's roughly 1,500 'mini-hotels' now existing in Frankfurt.

The actual hotel-owners angry?  No one has suggested that, but it is unfair competition....if you think about it.

Black-money worries as well?  Well, the article didn't touch on that little issue. You see....if you were going into Frankfurt for three weeks in some job-capacity.....you could find some guy to rent out his 'flat' for cash-only.  This might amount to a thousand Euro....which isn't reported as income.  Somewhere in the mix of this whole government involvement business....I suspect that tax problems also bother some folks.