I suspect that real estate prices are dragged up by fear of inflation. People in my country buy whatever has a roof, because they do not want their savings to go to waste.
Agreed. Some people/institutions have access to more money than can be productively used so they bid up anything that has the potential to make money, be it startups, Bitcoin or housing.
We had even slightly lower interest rate on mortgages in 2017 and the market was nowhere as hot as today.
I am sort-of familiar with real estate market in Prague and Ostrava, two very different cities.
Apartments in Ostrava were hard to sell even with low interest rates, because the city lost 10 per cent of its population - a typical rust belt phenomenon. Even just two years ago, an apartment put on market in Ostrava could be there for half a year before attracting a serious buyer.
They are now hot like hell and more than twice as much expensive.
Is the real estate market (esp. for renting out) actually dominated by private investors and their savings? Here in German cities, it feels like it's dominated by faceless investors and corporations but I have no data to back that up.
In March-May 2021, I was looking for an apartment or smaller house in my city of birth, Ostrava. The market was crazy, but the prospective buyers looked like regular people. Sometimes 15-20 of us met in a single location and had to be shepherded through the dwelling in groups.
99.99% for-rent apartments I’ve seen in Western Europe were owned by some huge company. That’s a stark contrast to Eastern Europe where you’re much more likely to rent a privately owned property.
This may be because of local laws or city council rules. In many cities the developer of a complex today is forced by law to have a certain percentage of the development dedicated for rental (Munich I think may be the leader here with a proposed 80% for rental). The only way to achieve this is to have the apartments owned by the developer or handed over to another management company (or investor) for rental only.
It's also why you sometimes see a development with a several rows of houses meant for sale flanked by one or more apartment buildings with a far smaller footprint but enough floors to equal roughly the same usable area in order to get the project approved.
actually in Germany 60% of the appartments are owned by private individuals 10% state/local governments, 10% coops (Genossenschaft), and the reminder corporations. (While statistics differ a bit depending on where you draw the line between some private owner and a corporation for auch a statistic)
https://www.savills.de/insight-and-opinion/savills-news/2756... is one survey with some numbers
The laws I mentioned are relatively new [0]. So for now it's hard to compete in numbers with a century of already built apartments. And eventually all "for rent" units do go on the market for sale.
But it's also easy to see why for someone looking for rent in many big cities today it looks like most apartments are owned by big management companies. New developments in "hot" cities with high demand and such laws are owned by a management company because that's the only way it works. You'd see entire buildings owned by the developer. It will take decades for those new apartments to go into private ownership.
