Housing Market Report Berlin 2018

If you think back to the start of the 2000s, Eberhard Diepgen was still the mayor of Berlin and many apartments cost less than 4 Euros per square metre per month. The central station was then just Lehrter station, to the north of which golf balls were flying through the Berlin night. The city was struggling under acres of vacant office space and, back then, it was hardly imaginable that corporations like Amazon, Google, eBay and Zalando should be based in Berlin. More than 15 years and a financial crisis later, Berlin is on its way to becoming one of the most inspiring, powerful and liveliest cities in the world; a world in which modern living and working environments are coalescing. Troy McMullen, our guest author from New York, presents an animated description of this trend in his “View of Berlin from the outside”, and Boris Pofalla underlines this in our cover article on the former wholesale flower market in Kreuzberg. The enormous population growth in recent years is creating major challenges for the city. Rising prices and excess demand are only two of the current catchwords in this context. In our detailed examination, we analyse the current trends at neighbourhood level, while the analysis of the surrounding areas extends well beyond the boundaries of Berlin. In the report, a developer and a tenants’ representative discuss how the players in the Berlin housing market are coping with this balancing act – with some significant overlaps. We warmly invite you to explore these and other phenomena. Let the variety of Berlin inspire you!