Back around two years ago....the Merkel coalition government cooked up this law defined as a 'rental brake'. This was supposed to be the savior for the affordable apartment mess that everyone was hyped up about.
The deal involved cities which would be required to collect data....establish a baseline, and then limit apartment prices from escalating 'unfairly'. The deal meant data-collection over ALL rents in the city.....for four years, and rent could only go up around 20-percent per a year year period....more than that....was illegal.
What if your city refused to collect the data? Amusing enough....several cities didn't play along. There was no mechanism to force them into this game.
So all of this comes up today because a Berlin regional court spoke up and said the law is unconstitutional. What happens now? It'll get shoved up to the national level and the Constitutional Court will have a review.
The Berlin court says on the principle of equality (as written in the Basic Law)....it doesn't work. In some ways, I'd suspect that you'd have to make the system work in every single village, city or urban region....and it just wasn't built to work like that. If you were a landlord from a town a mile outside of the rent-brake region? You were unaffected, and could do a renovation program and jump the rent up 50-percent over a two-year period.
You can figure at least a year will be wasted by the national court folks, and this will all come back to the Bundestag to work up another fix. Trying to make the rental-brake work across the entire nation and all towns? Go and explain this to the Landlords and how you'd make this work. I doubt if you can find that many who'd be happy over such a massive program and the amount of regulation required.
Yet, it'll be another Merkel coalition that has to deal with this mess.
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