德国柏林市中心全翻新住宅房47平方米, 只售人民币56万, 每平方米售@12000人民币, 易出租可代租，回报高，保值又升值! Germany Berlin real estate 47sqm, near city centre good location, selling price Euro 70670, easy to rent out, rental management service available, attractive rental return.
2012年10月29日 星期一
德国柏林市中心全翻新住宅房47平方米, 只售人民币56万 Germany Berlin city centre apartments 47sqm selling at 70670 Euro
http://www.ziegertasia.com/index.php?cms=estate/estate&path=&estate_id=183
德国柏林市中心全翻新住宅房47平方米, 只售人民币56万, 每平方米售@12000人民币, 易出租可代租，回报高，保值又升值! Germany Berlin real estate 47sqm, near city centre good location, selling price Euro 70670, easy to rent out, rental management service available, attractive rental return.
德国柏林市中心全翻新住宅房47平方米, 只售人民币56万, 每平方米售@12000人民币, 易出租可代租，回报高，保值又升值! Germany Berlin real estate 47sqm, near city centre good location, selling price Euro 70670, easy to rent out, rental management service available, attractive rental return.
2012年10月28日 星期日
國際買家青睞柏林豪宅 (華爾街日報) 2012年 10月 25日
柏
林低廉的租金和廢棄的倉庫孕育了眾多活力四射的夜店、畫廊和畫室，讓柏林成為歐洲最熱門的文化聖地。但這座被其市長形容為“貧窮但性感”的德國首都直到最近也只有少數幾個大型公寓項目。現在，豪華公寓在這座人口350萬的城市急劇增多。過去一年豪華公寓的建設增長了近10倍。這種轉型証實了一個長期公認的看法，即柏林會將其“飢餓藝術家”聚集區變成世界創意產業的中心。
幾 個最大的項目已經在柏林市中心的米特（Mitte）社區破土動工。這裡是議會以及其他政府大樓的所在地。該區最早屬於東德，但卻是柏林的歷史中心，擁有勃 蘭登堡門（Brandenburg Gate）和柏林大教堂（Berlin cathedral）等地標建築。它是柏林 倒塌後第一個得到復興的社區。
其 中一個豪華的新項目是濱臨斯普利河（Spree River）的Yoo Berlin。這棟10層階梯式建築的外觀由柏林建築師埃克•貝克爾（Eike Becker）設計，室內由法國設計師菲利普•斯塔克（Philippe Starck）打造。這棟擁有95套公寓的大樓預計於明年底完工，它是倫敦設計事務所Yoo與開發商合作、設計並宣傳的全球37個城市高檔住宅網絡的一部 分。
這棟大樓中帶兩個露台的頂層角落公寓報價高達470萬美元，面積為3,014平方英尺（約280平方米）。該項目發言人說，約75%的公寓都已經售出，買家主要來自意大利、美國、中國、澳大利亞，還有德國。大樓的總銷售額預計將達到1.07億美元左右。
Yoo Berlin有一個稱為“健康水療區”的區域，帶酒吧、中庭和咖啡廳。這些是在柏林幾乎聞所未聞的豪華設施。柏林公寓樓直到最近才引入了24小時門衛、健身房和免費窗戶清洗服務。
在 附近Living Bauhaus的開發項目Das Meisterhaus中，3,229平方英尺（約300平方米）的頂層公寓價格高達900萬美元。室內空間為定制設計，買主可以選擇是否需要泳池、壁 爐、帶冷卻頂板的天花板、冷凍室和酒窖，還有豪華廚房和衛浴。大樓晚上會點亮LED燈。蒙古大使館將會在明年2月率先入駐該大樓。
米特區最新的一個建設項目是Lux，這幢位於Unter den Linden大街和斯普利河之間的大樓共有64套公寓。
這 棟公寓樓為流線型玻璃結構，由西班牙房地產公司Triple A承建。據仲量聯行（Jones Lang LaSalle）的研究顯示，這棟樓的公寓價格從34.9萬至410萬美元不等，也就是每平方英尺540到1,260美元不等，該區平均房價為每平方英尺 400美元。該項目開發和建設成本約為5,800萬美元，目前已有約55%售出或預訂。該項目將於本月晚些時候破土動工。
Lux經紀人尼古勞斯•思傑（Nikolaus Ziegert）表示，柏林目前共有包含260套新公寓的九個項目在建或處於籌備階段，均價為每平方英尺600美元或以上。
還 有一棟在去年年末動工的住宅樓是1.1億美元的Die Kronprinzengarten，即太子花園（Crown Prince's Garden），是位於德國外交部附近的聯排別墅和公寓群。該項目包括約50個居住單元，價格從51.7萬到520萬美元不等。單元面積最高達5,920 平方英尺（約550平方米），包括七棟聯排別墅。購買頂層公寓者可要求配備頂層泳池。該項目代理商ICON Investmentconsulting說已經售出75%，預計將於2014年年底開盤。
盡管如此，柏林的豪華樓盤還是只佔整個市場的3%左右。有人質疑柏林是否已經為這種高檔的都市生活方式做好了準備，因為柏林最有錢的購房者通常都安家在柏林西部郊區。
改變購房者需求向更豪華住房轉變的一個因素是，諾基亞（Nokia）、德國聯邦鐵路公司（Deutsche Bahn）和拜耳（Bayer）等公司正吸引越來越多的高管來到柏林，同時政府也在擴張，引領人們適應更富足的生活方式。
仲量聯行的一份報告顯示，柏林在過去幾年人口迅速增長，其中半數以上的增長來自搬來柏林的外籍人士。單米特區的居民過去五年就增加了約6,800人。
房地產公司Berlin Capital Investments國際市場負責人卡汀•漢瑞科茲（Khadine Henriquez）說，柏林的人開始賺更多的錢了。該公司專做米特區的房地產項目。
她說，就在2007年，她剛從巴黎搬到柏林的時候，米特的女士們穿衣服還是追求舒適。她說，當時沒有人穿細高跟鞋，而現在找不到不塗指甲不穿高跟鞋的姑娘了。
就在那年，當地媒體報道布拉德•皮特（Brad Pitt）和安吉麗娜•茱莉（Angelina Jolie）在米特區購置了一套loft。
漢瑞科茲說，對豪華住宅需求的增加也反映了德國以及法國、南歐、亞洲和美國投資者的一個舉動──為歐洲債務危機尋找避險之地。她說該公司代理的豪宅75%左右的買家都來自其他國家。
和法蘭克福及慕尼黑等德國其他城市相比，在柏林買豪宅比較劃算。從仲量聯行的研究數據來看，在慕尼黑，房地產市場最高檔的10%房屋均價約每平方英尺822美元，而在柏林約為464美元。
柏林的代理商表示，相對中檔公寓，高檔公寓需要更多的時間才能賣出去。米特區的房子可能是個例外。從仲量聯行的報告來看，去年米特區建了211套住宅，公寓每平方英尺均價上漲了21%。
代 理商表示，外國買家需要留意柏林房地產市場一些特有的情況。買家需要支付約相當於成交價12%到15%的過戶費用，包括1.5%的公証費、5%的房地產稅 以及約7%的中介費。還有，國際買家需要用現金支付約一半的房款。漢瑞科茲說，德國銀行一般只提供60%的貸款，非德國籍人士可以拿到低至2.7％的10 年期或20年期利率。
她說，德國在前十年會對房產征收資本利得稅，所以買家對自己的投資至少應該維持十年。
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柏林概況
總人口：350萬
生活成本：在截至8月的12個月內，德國的消費者價格指數（CPI）增長了2.1%，而美國同期增幅為1.7%。
平均最高和最低氣溫：1月──36/28華氏度（約2/-2攝氏度），7月──73/57華氏度 (23/14攝氏度）
過去一年100萬美元以上住宅的銷售情況：在柏林，2011年僅五套公寓以每平方英尺1,201美元以上的價格售出。2012年截至6月，共有七套公寓以超出這個數字的價格售出。
住在米特區的名人：德國總理安格拉•默克爾（Angela Merkel），布拉德•皮特和安吉麗娜•茱莉，德國歌手莎拉•寇娜（Sarah Connor），廣告巨頭及藝術藏家克裡斯蒂安•博羅斯（Christian Boros）。
談資：米特意為“中間”，這裡曾被柏林 一分為二，這裡擁有勃蘭登堡門、查理檢查哨（Checkpoint Charlie）和國會大廈（Reichstag）等歷史景點，還有約80家咖啡館。整個柏林有2,139間酒吧和會所。
資料來源：《華爾街日報》調研；柏林旅遊局
Laura Stevens / Vanessa Fuhrmans
2012年10月19日 星期五
German Office Acquisitions at Highest in Five Years
from Bloomberg.com 2012 / 10 / 18
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-18/german-office-acquisitions-at-highest-in-five-years.html
nvestors spent more on office properties in Germany through September than in any initial nine-month period for five years, buying more than twice as much in Berlin and Munich than the same period last year. Office properties valued at 6.27 billion euros ($8.22 billion) were sold in the first nine months of 2012, a 50 percent increase from 2011, according to data compiled by BNP Paribas (BNP) SA’s German real estate unit.
“Safety-oriented investors see good conditions here due to the relatively stable economic and employment situation,” Sven Stricker, head of investment at BNP Paribas Real Estate GmbH, said in a statement today. “Office investments have a good medium-term outlook, assuming the euro crisis doesn’t escalate.”
Demand for German property has jumped this year as investors seek a safe place to put their money amid the risk the euro zone’s sovereign-debt crisis will worsen. Germany’s economy, Europe’s largest, is forecast to grow 0.8 percent this year, according to the government. The economies of the 17 nations that share the euro are together forecast to contract 0.4 percent, according to the European Central Bank.
Office investments rose 172 percent in Berlin and 138 percent in Munich, Germany’s most expensive city for workplace properties. Investments in Hamburg, Cologne and Dusseldorf declined, Paris-based BNP said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Dalia Fahmy in Berlin at dfahmy1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Ross Larsen at rlarsen2@bloomberg.net
歐債危機推動德國房價大漲
鉅亨網新聞中心2012/10/19 星期五 08:00
德國最大的房地產中介公司Engel & Volkers18日發布的最新調查報告表示，歐債危機推動德國房價大幅上漲，已導致該國房地產業出現泡沫。
德國地方法院最新拍賣數據顯示，一套位於柏林郊區102平方米、價值8.6萬歐元的公寓，在買家的競相爭搶下，最終以高於原價3倍的價格成交。據 Engel & Volkers數據顯示，在截至6月的過去12個月內，柏林房價同比上漲20%，德國整體房價同比上漲6%。在近3年間，柏林平均房屋銷售價格累計上漲高 達37.5%。德國赫拉巴銀行分析師米特羅波利斯表示，由於金融機構按揭利率已大幅下降，許多家庭開始有能力購買房產。此外，市場投資品種匱乏及政府債券 的低利率甚至負利率，使投資者認為投資房地產相對保值，並且是對沖通脹的最好選擇，導致長期處於“沉睡”狀態的房地產市場被激活。與歐洲其他國家不同，一 直以來德國民眾的房屋擁有率很低，德國人偏好租房而不習慣自購房產。
Engel & Volkers主管瑞尼表示：“德國以外的買家涌入德國房產市場也助推本土房價進一步上漲，投資者認為，假如歐元區分裂，投資德國將是安全的選擇。”
德國地方法院最新拍賣數據顯示，一套位於柏林郊區102平方米、價值8.6萬歐元的公寓，在買家的競相爭搶下，最終以高於原價3倍的價格成交。據 Engel & Volkers數據顯示，在截至6月的過去12個月內，柏林房價同比上漲20%，德國整體房價同比上漲6%。在近3年間，柏林平均房屋銷售價格累計上漲高 達37.5%。德國赫拉巴銀行分析師米特羅波利斯表示，由於金融機構按揭利率已大幅下降，許多家庭開始有能力購買房產。此外，市場投資品種匱乏及政府債券 的低利率甚至負利率，使投資者認為投資房地產相對保值，並且是對沖通脹的最好選擇，導致長期處於“沉睡”狀態的房地產市場被激活。與歐洲其他國家不同，一 直以來德國民眾的房屋擁有率很低，德國人偏好租房而不習慣自購房產。
Engel & Volkers主管瑞尼表示：“德國以外的買家涌入德國房產市場也助推本土房價進一步上漲，投資者認為，假如歐元區分裂，投資德國將是安全的選擇。”
2012年10月4日 星期四
The Transformation of Berlin From 'Poor but Sexy' to Rich and Unaffordable (Part I)
For a long time, they didn't know that a Danish investor who almost went bankrupt in the financial crisis had purchased their building. They also didn't know that this investor is now selling apartments in the building one by one, often to ordinary private buyers from southern Europe who, prompted by the euro crisis, are seeking to move their savings to a safer place -- and that their apartments could also be on the market.
An Intoxicated Real Estate Market
The way Torsten, Henning and Jakob see the situation, their building has become the scene of multiple global economic crises. The way others see it, what is happening in the German capital in 2012 is, quite simply, a real estate boom.
In this odd environment, two types of people are coming into conflict: On the one hand, there are the foreigners, or new Berliners, who are looking for something to buy. On the other, there are the locals, the old Berliners, who wonder how much longer they'll be able to stay. Those in the first group tend to look up as they walk the streets, checking out buildings and looking for good investments. Those in the second are just trying to get home.
Despite these differences, they are all anxious. The foreigners are anxious about their modest assets, which they hope to convert into valuable real estate before the euro goes bust. Meanwhile, native Berliners are worried about the city they call home. And this anxiety, which affects all of Germany and many other European countries, is being transformed into a euphoria of sorts in the Berlin real estate market.
Torsten, one of Taekker's tenants, says: "They are trying to take our city away from us."
Valeria Fiori, one of Taeker's customers, says: "Prices are still attractive in Berlin, and it's a good investment."
Taekker himself says: "I love Berlin. Things are looking up for Berlin."
The market is in a state of intoxication. Residential real estate prices in Berlin have risen by 32 percent since 2007, which is significantly more than in the rest of Germany. There were about 32,000 real estate transactions in Berlin in 2011 alone, a 20 percent increase over the previous year, and the trend is continuing. In that same period, sales increased by 28 percent, from €8.7 billion ($11.2 billion) to €11.1 billion.
According to the German rent index, average rents have gone up by 4 percent a year since 2009, which translates into higher profits for property owners. In Germany and elsewhere, people are scraping together their equity, taking out loans at historically low interest rates and investing in real estate, preferably in Berlin, where prices are still much lower than they are in Hamburg or Munich even with the current boom. Purchase inquiries have grown by 500 percent since 2007 on Immobilienscout24, a widely used real estate website in Germany.
A Winning Formula
The Graefe Kiez, one of the neighborhoods responsible for the poor-but-sexy image that has turned Berlin into a global brand, is just outside the door of the building housing Taekker's office. The Taekker logo, with the letters a and e combined, appears on many street corners and some construction sites.
While old Berliners pronounce the name like a curse, new Berliners see it as a promise. "Yet another building has fallen into Taekker's hands," says local tenant activist Martin Breger. The entire street has been "Taekker-ed," he adds. There is even a website called Taekkerwatch that bills itself as a "self-help site for renters affected by the privatization of apartments by the Taekker group of companies in Berlin." Potential buyers, however, use the site to stay abreast of properties Taekker is about to put on the market.
"Of course we're intruding into the neighborhood. I understand why people feel anxious," says Taekker, 56, whose company owns 3,500 residential units in the city. In his own estimation, he is one of the largest private investors in the Berlin market. In his trademark jeans and worn T-shirt, he looks no different from the Berliners whose apartments he is buying up. Taekker sees himself as a capitalist with good manners. "We're obviously here to make money," he says, "but we're doing it in an ethically correct way, within the framework of the law."
The company has expanded its Berlin portfolio since the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, generally focusing on buildings built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Friedrichshain, Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg and Kreuzberg neighborhoods.
When asked what brought him to Germany, Taekker says: "I was looking for new investment options in Europe." He is sitting in a glass-enclosed conference room. Hundreds of white ring binders line the walls in the open-plan office, each with an address on the spine: Böckhstrasse 13, Dieffenbachstrasse 38, Maybachufer 47. The addresses, all in good neighborhoods, have a magical sound for new Berliners.
Taekker is a carpenter and building engineer by trade. In Berlin, he discovered what he had found in Copenhagen a decade ago: "A city with a left-led government and not much money, but with a fantastic atmosphere and many beautiful and inexpensive old buildings." After the turn of the millennium, when prices were high, Taekker sold more than 70 buildings in Copenhagen. Then he went looking for a new place to apply the same simple strategy: buy low and sell high when the boom arrives.
For a while, Taekker investigated properties in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, but he felt that Berlin had more potential. "I couldn't understand why prices were so low," he says. "Someone must have overlooked something." When Taekker talks about his job, it sounds like a game of global Monopoly, one in which players aim to occupy the right properties, collect rent, hope for a lucky roll of the dice, sell and move on.
Residential Gold Rush
Marcel Magdeburg, a broker who works for Taekker, is driving to an appointment in a blue Smart. The miniature two-seater is the perfect car for him because his job often requires some creative parking. Magdeburg grew up in Potsdam, outside Berlin, has been working for Taekker for five years, and sells or rents residential real estate throughout the city. His days consist of a lot of driving, climbing stairs and showing empty rooms to prospective buyers or renters.
The upturn in Berlin -- eagerly anticipated by many since German reunification but feared by others -- seems to have finally arrived. Foreign buyers, who now make up 30 percent of the market, are also increasingly fueling demand. Most of the foreigners now investing in Berlin are Italian, Spanish, Russian, British or French.
The Transformation of Berlin From 'Poor but Sexy' to Rich and Unaffordable (Part II)
By Wiebke Hollersen and Guido Mingels
Carsten Koall/ DER SPIEGEL
Valeria Fiori, the potential buyer from Milan, has brought along her
husband, as she always does, as well as one of her grandchildren.
"They're at the Lego Museum right now," she says. She is wearing a pink
sweater, jeans and comfortable shoes, looking the part of a typical
tourist on a sightseeing trip. She's in Berlin to buy another apartment,
and this time she is looking at a two-room unit in Friedrichshain.
It'll be her fourth investment in the Berlin market. Fiori is retired
but says she doesn't receive a pension in Italy.
It's very quite in Taekker's office, even though a dozen people are working at long tables doubling as desks. Fiori wants to reserve the Friedrichshain apartment, but she still has a few questions. When will the contract be ready? How quickly can the brokers find her a tenant? She doesn't like the fact that a lot of people have now discovered that there's money to be made with Berlin real estate. "Prices have really gone up. It's terrible," she says, sounding almost like a native Berliner.
Three years ago, Fiori was online when she discovered an apartment on Leipziger Strasse in the Mitte neighborhood. It was a 100-square-meter (1,076-square-foot) unit on the 20th floor, and she snapped it up at once. The first thing she did was to have eucalyptus parquet flooring installed in the high-rise unit. It has a view of the Mauerpark, a park in the Prenzlauer Berg district that the Berlin Wall once ran through, she says. Fiori owns another small apartment not far from the Mauerpark, as well as a unit near Weinberg Park, in Mitte. Her husband owns an apartment building in the Moabit neighborhood, as well as three other individual apartments.
The real estate is, in a sense, the Fiori family's "Berlin fund," and expansions are always a possibility. Would they consider buying in another German city? "Oh no," she says, "it's much too expensive."
When a new Berliner runs into an old Berliner in this odd period of fear and euphoria, there's usually a moment when the conversation takes a turn for the worse. Is €500 rent for a heated, 60-square-meter apartment with plank flooring and a balcony with a view of the Spree River a ridiculously small amount? Or is it highway robbery?
Soon the old Berliner loses his temper because the new Berliner starts trying to explain the world -- and capitalism. Apartments are a commodity, the new Berliner says, and when demand increases, so do prices.
Cities that are considered cool are expensive. Prices in New York are outrageous, while costs are sky-high in London. Complaints about outrageous rents are part of the narrative of a successful city. But Berlin used to be an exception.
Pushed Out
The narrative of Berlin's transformation from an isolated Cold War island surrounded by a communist sea to a city famous for its artists and nightlife has always revolved around low rents. The eastern part of Berlin used to be a socialist city, while the western part was a frontier city kept alive by subsidies. Old buildings were crumbling in Prenzlauer Berg when it was part of East Berlin and in Kreuzberg in West Berlin. Even after reunification, rents remained low.
Now they are going up. According to GSW Immobilien AG, a major real estate firm in Berlin, rents increased by almost 8 percent in 2011. Some 85 percent of Berliners rent rather than own their homes, and their concerns over rising rents are also a symptom of the boom. The current conflict between renters and owners poses a threat to a way of life in Berlin. It threatens people with few material but high cultural standards, standards they associate with their Kiez, slang for their local living environment. For many Berliners, their Kiez represents a smaller, more manageable part of the big city they call home.
"It just makes you wonder where we're supposed to go," says Torsten, who works in the media industry. Taekker's three tenants, sitting on their roof deck in Kreuzberg, want to remain anonymous because they're afraid of being thrown out. But whether their fears are justified isn't quite clear. Taekker has owned their building since 2006. Last year, residents received a letter informing them that their rental apartments were going to be "converted" or, in other words, sold.
Jakob, who works in the music business, moved to the area 15 years ago "because everything was no nice and non-trendy." Now he's surrounded by hipsters, tourists and stroller-pushing mothers. "We have no problem with trendiness," says Jakob, "as long it doesn't drive us out." Henning, the third member of the trio, works in IT. He pays about €200 for his 35-square-meter apartment -- and that's all he can afford, he says.
When asked what exactly they have against Taekker, the men grow quiet. The Berlin press has recently described harassment of tenants by landlords, but no one in the building has heard anything about such behavior. "Their behavior is generally pretty decent," they say. The tenants in the building were able to prevent Taekker from raising rents by threatening a lawsuit. Some tenants accepted settlements and voluntarily left their apartments when they were sold. So what's so bad about Taekker? "They don't do anything for the building," says Torsten. "All they've done is install bike racks."
Born of Crisis
Meanwhile, Taekker is raving about the quality of old buildings and the beauty of the herringbone parquet flooring and plaster walls in his buildings. He feels that his way of doing things is more sustainable than the methods of many German investors. "They buy a building, strip it from the inside out and turn it into luxury apartments," he says. "It's the most profitable approach." For his part, Taekker leaves the renovation up to the buyers.
Taekker admits that he has done well in Berlin. "We showed up at the right time and bought in the right neighborhoods," he says, with satisfaction in his voice. One could also say that Berlin was Taekker's salvation. In 2008, his Danish parent company got caught up in the global financial crisis and was on the brink of bankruptcy. The company had taken out loans from Danish banks, such as Roskilde Bank and FIH Erhvervsbank. Roskilde declared bankruptcy, and FIH was acquired by the Icelandic bank Kaupthing Bank, which eventually had to be nationalized.
Taekker, as a customer of FIH, was on a list of Kaupthing borrowers published by Wikileaks. His German assets were used as collateral in the restructuring of the company. It was only thanks to his properties in Berlin that the company managed to get back on its feet, says Taekker. The company is now making a profit again.
The three tenants sitting on the roof deck have heard about these deals. The rumors revolve around an unusual geopolitical chain of events that ends in a Berlin apartment building. An investor from the north loses money in the global credit crisis in 2008, and his company only becomes profitable once again when the demand for his Berlin properties increases.
In a roundabout way, the bursting of the real estate bubble in the United States led to a real estate boom in Berlin years later. German investors who would normally put their money in the stock market started buying real estate in Berlin. Countries in southern Europe began to falter in the wake of the European debt crisis, and their citizens, seeking a safer place for their money, also came to Berlin. For Torsten, Jakob and Henning, the story boils down to a cash-strapped investor from the north selling apartments to people from the south trying to escape the crisis.
Getting in the Game
"Do you like the area?" Fiori asks her son, who has also come to Berlin from Italy for a few days. They are standing on a restaurant-lined section of Krossener Strasse in Friedrichshain. Fiori wants to show her son her latest purchase.
It's the first property she has bought in Friedrichshain, which strikes her as a nice neighborhood for young people. The 53-square-meter apartment has a large eat-in kitchen and a full bath. She had actually intended to pay no more than €2,000 per square meter, but she and Taekker eventually agreed on a price of €109,000, or €2,056 per square meter. Fiori is the first buyer in the building. Taekker has just started putting the apartments on the market, and the tenants have reportedly taken the news fairly well.
When Fiori started investing in Berlin five years ago, the average price per square meter for an unfurnished apartment in an older building was just €1,540. By the beginning of last year, it had gone up to €1,715. Fiori, like most buyers in Berlin, prefers older buildings. In Milan, where she lives, a nice apartment "still goes for about €4,000" per square meter, she says -- twice as much as in Friedrichshain.
Fiori is waiting for the sales contract, but the notary public is very busy at the moment and it'll take a few more days, says a Taekker employee. "But you'll receive two bottles of wine from us at the closing, organic wine," he adds. Both Taekker and his company value organic products, says the employee. "Aha," says Fiori. Then she asks when the next apartment will be available for purchase in the building.
The boom has turned many in Berlin into real estate experts and entrepreneurs, and there are many who want to play the game of Berlinopoly. The number of private buyers has gone up by 30 percent in the last five years. Whereas the last boom, between 2004 and 2007, was fueled by a handful of large institutional investors seeking short-term profits, today's investors include thousands of private individuals seeking long-term security in the German capital. Instead of the corporate raiders that were dubbed "locusts," many of today's real estate investors could more aptly be called "ants."
They include people like Micol Singarella. When the 30-year-old from Aprilia, near Rome, moved to Berlin a few years ago, she would never have dreamed that the euro crisis would turn her into a real estate broker. She studied literature and philosophy, and she now lives in a shared apartment in Friedrichshain that she describes as a sort of leftist residential project.
Singarella sells real estate from her room in the apartment or from a table at a local pub, mostly to relatives and acquaintances from her hometown in Italy. Half of Aprilia has already bought "Appartamenti a Berlino," the words she has printed on her business card. She recently sold three units in an apartment building in the Wedding district to the parents of a friend from Aprilia, a childhood friend and a teacher from her old school. "Some of my clients believe that if the euro collapses, they'll eventually get their money back in deutsche marks," Singarella says.
Her services also include finding tenants for the apartments once they've been purchased. It's the easiest part of her job. "Everyone seems to be moving to this city at the moment," she says. According to demographers, Berlin is experiencing a "positive net migration," which amounted to almost 40,000 new residents in 2011. At the same time, more and more people want to live alone, and the fact that one in three Berliners lives in a single household contributes to the boom.
Singarella's roommates sometimes ask her questions about her job. Is it okay to sell condominiums in Berlin, they ask? Or is she partly responsible for rising rents? And is she partly responsible for people losing their apartments? Singarella tells them that she doesn't sell to shady real estate funds, but to people who are worried about their savings. But sometimes she does ask herself whether she and all the others who are flocking to the city, bringing their money and their worries, aren't destroying a utopia.
Migrating Dreams
It's the dream of a big city where things don't work quite the way they do in other big cities, a European capital where retirees, students and families with little money can afford to live in good neighborhoods, where people like Jakob, the Taekker tenant, can make a living in the music business. This unique aspect of the city has been referred to as the "Berlin mix." Urban sociologists predict that this mix will not survive, at least not in downtown Berlin. They suspect that people with lower incomes will be forced out to the periphery, as they are in other cities. Berlin is merely catching up to a wider development, say real estate experts.
A cosmopolitan city with low rents? It would be a nice dream. But Jørn Taekker has a different dream. His latest project is the construction of a small, sustainable city north of Aarhus, his hometown in Denmark, and his company has already designed the master plan. An estimated 15,000 people will start moving to the 220-hectare (544-acre) city in 2015. It will be heated with solar and geothermal energy, there will be rainwater collection systems and there will be car-sharing for everyone. Taekker is investing his German profits in the Danish city. As an era comes to an end in Berlin, a new era is beginning near Aarhus. The new city will be called "Nye," the Danish word for "new."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
It's very quite in Taekker's office, even though a dozen people are working at long tables doubling as desks. Fiori wants to reserve the Friedrichshain apartment, but she still has a few questions. When will the contract be ready? How quickly can the brokers find her a tenant? She doesn't like the fact that a lot of people have now discovered that there's money to be made with Berlin real estate. "Prices have really gone up. It's terrible," she says, sounding almost like a native Berliner.
Three years ago, Fiori was online when she discovered an apartment on Leipziger Strasse in the Mitte neighborhood. It was a 100-square-meter (1,076-square-foot) unit on the 20th floor, and she snapped it up at once. The first thing she did was to have eucalyptus parquet flooring installed in the high-rise unit. It has a view of the Mauerpark, a park in the Prenzlauer Berg district that the Berlin Wall once ran through, she says. Fiori owns another small apartment not far from the Mauerpark, as well as a unit near Weinberg Park, in Mitte. Her husband owns an apartment building in the Moabit neighborhood, as well as three other individual apartments.
The real estate is, in a sense, the Fiori family's "Berlin fund," and expansions are always a possibility. Would they consider buying in another German city? "Oh no," she says, "it's much too expensive."
When a new Berliner runs into an old Berliner in this odd period of fear and euphoria, there's usually a moment when the conversation takes a turn for the worse. Is €500 rent for a heated, 60-square-meter apartment with plank flooring and a balcony with a view of the Spree River a ridiculously small amount? Or is it highway robbery?
Soon the old Berliner loses his temper because the new Berliner starts trying to explain the world -- and capitalism. Apartments are a commodity, the new Berliner says, and when demand increases, so do prices.
Cities that are considered cool are expensive. Prices in New York are outrageous, while costs are sky-high in London. Complaints about outrageous rents are part of the narrative of a successful city. But Berlin used to be an exception.
Pushed Out
The narrative of Berlin's transformation from an isolated Cold War island surrounded by a communist sea to a city famous for its artists and nightlife has always revolved around low rents. The eastern part of Berlin used to be a socialist city, while the western part was a frontier city kept alive by subsidies. Old buildings were crumbling in Prenzlauer Berg when it was part of East Berlin and in Kreuzberg in West Berlin. Even after reunification, rents remained low.
Now they are going up. According to GSW Immobilien AG, a major real estate firm in Berlin, rents increased by almost 8 percent in 2011. Some 85 percent of Berliners rent rather than own their homes, and their concerns over rising rents are also a symptom of the boom. The current conflict between renters and owners poses a threat to a way of life in Berlin. It threatens people with few material but high cultural standards, standards they associate with their Kiez, slang for their local living environment. For many Berliners, their Kiez represents a smaller, more manageable part of the big city they call home.
"It just makes you wonder where we're supposed to go," says Torsten, who works in the media industry. Taekker's three tenants, sitting on their roof deck in Kreuzberg, want to remain anonymous because they're afraid of being thrown out. But whether their fears are justified isn't quite clear. Taekker has owned their building since 2006. Last year, residents received a letter informing them that their rental apartments were going to be "converted" or, in other words, sold.
Jakob, who works in the music business, moved to the area 15 years ago "because everything was no nice and non-trendy." Now he's surrounded by hipsters, tourists and stroller-pushing mothers. "We have no problem with trendiness," says Jakob, "as long it doesn't drive us out." Henning, the third member of the trio, works in IT. He pays about €200 for his 35-square-meter apartment -- and that's all he can afford, he says.
When asked what exactly they have against Taekker, the men grow quiet. The Berlin press has recently described harassment of tenants by landlords, but no one in the building has heard anything about such behavior. "Their behavior is generally pretty decent," they say. The tenants in the building were able to prevent Taekker from raising rents by threatening a lawsuit. Some tenants accepted settlements and voluntarily left their apartments when they were sold. So what's so bad about Taekker? "They don't do anything for the building," says Torsten. "All they've done is install bike racks."
Born of Crisis
Meanwhile, Taekker is raving about the quality of old buildings and the beauty of the herringbone parquet flooring and plaster walls in his buildings. He feels that his way of doing things is more sustainable than the methods of many German investors. "They buy a building, strip it from the inside out and turn it into luxury apartments," he says. "It's the most profitable approach." For his part, Taekker leaves the renovation up to the buyers.
Taekker admits that he has done well in Berlin. "We showed up at the right time and bought in the right neighborhoods," he says, with satisfaction in his voice. One could also say that Berlin was Taekker's salvation. In 2008, his Danish parent company got caught up in the global financial crisis and was on the brink of bankruptcy. The company had taken out loans from Danish banks, such as Roskilde Bank and FIH Erhvervsbank. Roskilde declared bankruptcy, and FIH was acquired by the Icelandic bank Kaupthing Bank, which eventually had to be nationalized.
Taekker, as a customer of FIH, was on a list of Kaupthing borrowers published by Wikileaks. His German assets were used as collateral in the restructuring of the company. It was only thanks to his properties in Berlin that the company managed to get back on its feet, says Taekker. The company is now making a profit again.
The three tenants sitting on the roof deck have heard about these deals. The rumors revolve around an unusual geopolitical chain of events that ends in a Berlin apartment building. An investor from the north loses money in the global credit crisis in 2008, and his company only becomes profitable once again when the demand for his Berlin properties increases.
In a roundabout way, the bursting of the real estate bubble in the United States led to a real estate boom in Berlin years later. German investors who would normally put their money in the stock market started buying real estate in Berlin. Countries in southern Europe began to falter in the wake of the European debt crisis, and their citizens, seeking a safer place for their money, also came to Berlin. For Torsten, Jakob and Henning, the story boils down to a cash-strapped investor from the north selling apartments to people from the south trying to escape the crisis.
Getting in the Game
"Do you like the area?" Fiori asks her son, who has also come to Berlin from Italy for a few days. They are standing on a restaurant-lined section of Krossener Strasse in Friedrichshain. Fiori wants to show her son her latest purchase.
It's the first property she has bought in Friedrichshain, which strikes her as a nice neighborhood for young people. The 53-square-meter apartment has a large eat-in kitchen and a full bath. She had actually intended to pay no more than €2,000 per square meter, but she and Taekker eventually agreed on a price of €109,000, or €2,056 per square meter. Fiori is the first buyer in the building. Taekker has just started putting the apartments on the market, and the tenants have reportedly taken the news fairly well.
When Fiori started investing in Berlin five years ago, the average price per square meter for an unfurnished apartment in an older building was just €1,540. By the beginning of last year, it had gone up to €1,715. Fiori, like most buyers in Berlin, prefers older buildings. In Milan, where she lives, a nice apartment "still goes for about €4,000" per square meter, she says -- twice as much as in Friedrichshain.
Fiori is waiting for the sales contract, but the notary public is very busy at the moment and it'll take a few more days, says a Taekker employee. "But you'll receive two bottles of wine from us at the closing, organic wine," he adds. Both Taekker and his company value organic products, says the employee. "Aha," says Fiori. Then she asks when the next apartment will be available for purchase in the building.
The boom has turned many in Berlin into real estate experts and entrepreneurs, and there are many who want to play the game of Berlinopoly. The number of private buyers has gone up by 30 percent in the last five years. Whereas the last boom, between 2004 and 2007, was fueled by a handful of large institutional investors seeking short-term profits, today's investors include thousands of private individuals seeking long-term security in the German capital. Instead of the corporate raiders that were dubbed "locusts," many of today's real estate investors could more aptly be called "ants."
They include people like Micol Singarella. When the 30-year-old from Aprilia, near Rome, moved to Berlin a few years ago, she would never have dreamed that the euro crisis would turn her into a real estate broker. She studied literature and philosophy, and she now lives in a shared apartment in Friedrichshain that she describes as a sort of leftist residential project.
Singarella sells real estate from her room in the apartment or from a table at a local pub, mostly to relatives and acquaintances from her hometown in Italy. Half of Aprilia has already bought "Appartamenti a Berlino," the words she has printed on her business card. She recently sold three units in an apartment building in the Wedding district to the parents of a friend from Aprilia, a childhood friend and a teacher from her old school. "Some of my clients believe that if the euro collapses, they'll eventually get their money back in deutsche marks," Singarella says.
Her services also include finding tenants for the apartments once they've been purchased. It's the easiest part of her job. "Everyone seems to be moving to this city at the moment," she says. According to demographers, Berlin is experiencing a "positive net migration," which amounted to almost 40,000 new residents in 2011. At the same time, more and more people want to live alone, and the fact that one in three Berliners lives in a single household contributes to the boom.
Singarella's roommates sometimes ask her questions about her job. Is it okay to sell condominiums in Berlin, they ask? Or is she partly responsible for rising rents? And is she partly responsible for people losing their apartments? Singarella tells them that she doesn't sell to shady real estate funds, but to people who are worried about their savings. But sometimes she does ask herself whether she and all the others who are flocking to the city, bringing their money and their worries, aren't destroying a utopia.
Migrating Dreams
It's the dream of a big city where things don't work quite the way they do in other big cities, a European capital where retirees, students and families with little money can afford to live in good neighborhoods, where people like Jakob, the Taekker tenant, can make a living in the music business. This unique aspect of the city has been referred to as the "Berlin mix." Urban sociologists predict that this mix will not survive, at least not in downtown Berlin. They suspect that people with lower incomes will be forced out to the periphery, as they are in other cities. Berlin is merely catching up to a wider development, say real estate experts.
A cosmopolitan city with low rents? It would be a nice dream. But Jørn Taekker has a different dream. His latest project is the construction of a small, sustainable city north of Aarhus, his hometown in Denmark, and his company has already designed the master plan. An estimated 15,000 people will start moving to the 220-hectare (544-acre) city in 2015. It will be heated with solar and geothermal energy, there will be rainwater collection systems and there will be car-sharing for everyone. Taekker is investing his German profits in the Danish city. As an era comes to an end in Berlin, a new era is beginning near Aarhus. The new city will be called "Nye," the Danish word for "new."
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