Berlin has an extremely affordable rental market, unless you want to live in Mitte or nearby. Even Mitte would be more affordable, if 50-100 floor skyscrapers could get building permission.
I'm not sure how familiar with the London property market. London is currently
seeing a large amount of real estate being built, mostly studio, 1, 2 and
3 bedroom. Hardly luxurious. Prices are commensurate with London income levels. Otherwise people wouldn't live in London.
Before you talk about how affordable Berlin is you need to take the income of people living in Berlin into consideration. You can reasonably live in Berlin but it's by no means extremely affordable.
You also can't arbitrarily increase density of a city as you need infrastructure to go along with all those people. Not to mention that Berlin has many old buildings that are under protection, so you can't just demolish buildings and replace them with skyscrapers.
A part of the problem in London is the strength of rule of law, which means that rich people from everywhere in the world are storing nest eggs there by buying property, even if they don't live in that property. Almost every dictator, oligarch and prince of an oil-rich country puts in a stake, and smaller-scale money - which is still big scale - also finds a safe haven in the London property market.
I don't really think this has much significant impact on the housing shortage and pricing there, but some part of the housing stock there is owned by people who don't actually live there, and who can afford to keep it vacant just in case they need to move in one day.
I agree that some property is left empty, but this is extremely rare. There are just not enough lazy Billionaires that can afford this. In most cases empty means unable to sell or rent out. You'll notice that most developments in London these days (e.g. [1]) are mostly small studios, 1 or 2 bedrooms. That's because large luxury penthouses are hard to sell, there is little demand.
Most buyers of such property (whether private or investment funds like Deka-Immobilien or BlackRock Global Property or Brookfield Property Partner or one of the many others) do this as an investment vehicle with a particular risk/reward structure. They will absolutely have to rent out these properties, and indeed, when they fund property construction projects, as they have been on a massive scale in London in the last decade, they do so to cash in on rent.
Yes, the billionaires get a lot of blame but in terms of numbers, they are insignificant.
I would imagine that a much bigger issue is old people who are in a care home or a hospital, unable to live in their old place, but not willing/able to give it away either.
At least over here (Finland) this is the major reason for "empty" apartments in central areas of cities.
>Prices are commensurate with London income levels. Otherwise people wouldn't live in London.
I feel like most people are moving to the outer zones. Buying flats in zone 1-3 is obviously out of reach for most people, even for most developers not working in The City. From what I've seen, even 1-bedroom flats cost at least £310k near Seven Sisters (Zone 3).
I have to admit though that I was mostly looking for flats to rent, not for sale in the last few months so I'm not an expert.
That's not expensive relative to London income levels, given that property is typically financed over 25 years or so, basically over the most productive phase of one's working life, so it's paid off roughly when one retires. Most young people don't think long-term: they just look at the price and their current annual salary, and see a mismatch.
Maybe it's good this way, because unless you realise that a property is a serious long-term investment, and that the target is to save for retirement, they probably don't have the financial maturity to make such a large purchase and should stick to renting.
Note that property always reflects income-levels of the working population. That's because they are the ones that buy / rent property. Rent and property prices are strongly correlated, because it's fundamentally a risk/reward trade-off: when you buy you take on a fair amount of risk: heating may break down, the roof may leak, you might not find tenants in time, tenants may ruin the property, not pay rent etc etc (From bitter experience I can tell you that "may" really means "will"). Tenants don't carry this risk, hence need to compensate for this risk transfer. That's why renting appears to be more expensive.
Focussing on foreign billionaires who buy-to-leave-empty distorts how the property market works. The real question is: what percentage of their income is the average person willing to invest in property / rent. This is remarkably constant.
I'm not sure how familiar with the London property market. London is currently seeing a large amount of real estate being built, mostly studio, 1, 2 and 3 bedroom. Hardly luxurious. Prices are commensurate with London income levels. Otherwise people wouldn't live in London.