The industry's own research.

Existing buildings overtake new-build as main construction activity

Something significant has shifted in Germany's construction industry, largely without being planned. For the first time, the data suggests that renovation, conversion and repurposing of existing buildings are on the verge of overtaking new-build as the dominant form of construction activity in the country.

Germany’s hotel market rewards quality and punishes weakness

Germany's hotel market remains open for business in 2026. At the halfway stage, overnight stays are edging higher, investment transactions continue to take place and financing remains available for the right assets. Yet this apparent resilience disguises a market that has become far more discriminating, with…

Rate hold welcomed, but long-term financing costs show no sign of falling

The European Central Bank left its key interest rates unchanged at its July meeting, keeping the deposit rate at 2.25% following June's 25 basis point increase. The decision was universally anticipated and removes the immediate threat of another increase for property borrowers. It provides considerably less reason,…

Germany's residential rental market is seizing up

Germany's rental market is no longer defined simply by rising rents. It is increasingly defined by falling residential mobility. As inadequate housing supply, limited housing turnover and worsening affordability reinforce one another, tenants are remaining in existing homes for longer whilst competition intensifies…

Germany has the projects. It just can't build them.

Between the end of 2023 and the end of 2026, residential projects totalling 30.1 million square metres of living space were scheduled for completion across Germany. Around 9.4 million square metres — equivalent to roughly 125,000 homes — will not be delivered. Felix Embacher , managing director of researchers…

Construction costs replace financing as Germany's housing bottleneck

Germany's construction cost problem has entered a new and sharper phase. Prices for the construction of new conventional residential buildings rose by 5% in May 2026 compared with the same month last year, according to the Federal Statistical Office — the largest annual increase since August 2023. That represents a…

German foreclosures begin to reveal three years of financial stress

Germany's forced auction market is beginning to accelerate. In the first half of 2026, 7,845 properties were scheduled for compulsory sale, up 8.4% on the same period last year, according to specialist publisher Argetra . That rate of increase is almost double the 4.7% growth recorded during the whole of 2025.…

Europe's buildings directive leaves investors waiting for the rules

The European Union 's Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) gave member states until 29 May 2026 to transpose its provisions into national law. That deadline has now passed. Not a single member state has met it.

In Germany, it pays to be a landlord. Literally.

Imagine two neighbours in the same apartment building in Munich. Both bought identical apartments for €300,000 in the same year, under the same conditions, with the same financing. One lives in their apartment. The other rents it out. After fifteen years, the landlord has achieved a return on equity of just under…

How Germany's most conservative investors ended up in mezzanine property debt

The refinancing wall hits home for Germany's homeowners

Homeowners who borrowed during Germany’s era of ultra-cheap money are now reaching refinancing day — and discovering that refinancing in 2026 is not simply about paying a higher interest rate. It is about reconciling two very different financial realities: being substantially wealthier on paper while facing a much…

The mechanism behind Germany's property fund crisis

When REFIRE last updated readers on Germany's open-ended property fund sector in Issue 257, Leading Cities Invest had just become the first fund to enter formal liquidation. The situation has since moved quickly. By the end of June, two further funds had followed: Habona Nahversorgungsfonds Deutschland suspended…

Germany cuts transaction friction in property share deals

Germany has quietly resolved one longstanding source of transaction friction in its commercial real estate market. A law published on 2 July removes the risk of being charged real estate transfer tax twice on the same share deal — a problem that has added unnecessary cost and complexity to institutional real estate…

What Frankfurt tells us about Germany's office recovery

Frankfurt's office market has just produced two headlines that appear to describe different cities. Prime rents in the Central Business District reached €55 per square metre during the second quarter of 2026 — a new all-time high, surpassing even the peak of the dotcom boom. At the same time, office take-up during…

Federal bid to end expropriation opens constitutional battle

Germany's federal government has taken the unprecedented step of trying to remove one of the biggest sources of political uncertainty hanging over Germany's residential investment market. On 2 July, the CDU/CSU and SPD coalition committee agreed to introduce a federal law prohibiting Germany's states from using…

The market has reset. Many balance sheets have not

German commercial real estate is approaching the busiest refinancing year of the current cycle, with more than €40bn in loans maturing in 2026 — and most of that debt was priced when interest rates were a fraction of today's levels. The resulting financing gap could exceed €6bn this year alone, according to new…

Berlin's six-week rule reshapes serviced living finance

Berlin's planning authorities are increasingly treating stays beyond six weeks as residential use rather than temporary accommodation, according to planning lawyer Mathias Hellriegel , speaking at Heuer Dialog 's Jahreskongress Temporäres Wohnen in Berlin. The distinction may appear technical. In practice, it…

The restructuring wave hiding in plain sight

For three years, German real estate has been waiting for a wave of non-performing loans to break. It hasn't happened — and not because the underlying distress isn't real. According to panellists at a recent PB3C webinar on how Germany's property market is dealing with financial distress, lenders, borrowers and fund…

Investors find working models for Germany's school backlog

A former Deutsche Börse headquarters in Frankfurt now accommodates 3,200 students under a 30-year lease to the City of Frankfurt . Completed in just two and a half years after its conversion from office use, the project offers perhaps the clearest demonstration yet of why educational real estate is beginning to…

When housing subsidies become an asset class

Last month, REFIRE published a guest column by REM Capital 's CEO Jan Bewarder , setting out how generous Germany's 2026 subsidy environment had become for real estate investors and describing a rare window in which previously unviable projects could once again make financial sense. That assessment is holding up…

Germany's property funds stabilise as investors head for the exit

Germany's open-ended real estate funds ( GOEFs ) may finally be approaching the bottom of their crisis. Scope 's latest ratings round downgraded five funds, upgraded two and left twelve unchanged — a marked improvement on last year, when more than half the funds analysed were cut and none were upgraded at all. Yet…

The ECB moves, but capital markets set the pace

The European Central Bank raised its deposit rate by 25 basis points to 2.25% on Thursday 11th June, marking the first interest rate hike in nearly three years. The decision was unanimous and widely anticipated. ECB President Christine Lagarde offered no commitment to future steps, reiterating that the central bank…

PBSA in Germany: €1.5bn in new commitments as transactions replace announcements

Germany has 2.9 million university students, one of Europe's most severe shortages of purpose-built accommodation, and the most sought-after operational real estate segment among institutional investors. And yet German PBSA transactions stagnated at around €70 million in both 2023 and 2024. That gap between desire…

Germany's outpatient healthcare real estate crosses a threshold

Something unusual happened in the German real estate market in the first quarter of 2026. Healthcare properties — nursing homes, outpatient medical centres, Ärztehäuser — accounted for 12% of total transaction volume. The historical average is 2-4%. In absolute terms, the sector recorded over €1 billion in…

German property finance recovery stalls, with headwinds still building

Germany's property finance market entered 2026 with a fragile optimism that has not survived contact with reality. The German Real Estate Financing Index — the Difi , compiled quarterly by JLL and the Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI) — fell by almost ten points in Q1 2026 to minus 9.1, slipping…

Debt funds move further centre stage as banks pull back

German banks are retreating more deeply from real estate lending than many investors yet appreciate. At last week's Rueckerconsult INVESTMENT Expo in Berlin, Frederik Bräkling of Pax-Bank described a market where development finance at 50% LTV has become standard, second prolongations are increasingly common, and…

CRE debt repricing accelerates as leverage shifts lower

Senior loan spreads in European commercial real estate have nearly tripled since the start of 2024, rising from 1.1% to 3.2% over EURIBOR. That is not a cyclical wobble. It is a structural repricing of debt — and new data published in mid-May suggests the shift is accelerating.

Scarce sites drive continued demand for grocery retail

A notable milestone passed almost unnoticed in the German grocery retail investment market last year: for the first time, foreign capital outpaced domestic investment in the sector. It was one of the more striking data points to emerge from a panel discussion on European retail at the Rueckerconsult INVESTMENT Expo…

Office splits into winners and losers as market narrows

The day before this panel convened at the Rueckerconsult INVESTMENT Expo in Berlin last week, KanAm Grund signed a lease in the City of London at nearly £110 per square foot. Anthony Bull-Diamond , KanAm's chief executive, mentioned it almost in passing — as live confirmation of a rental trajectory that Philip La…

Core is no longer enough and value add must pay

"Classic core is largely dead. This is the decade of value add." That was Ramin Rabeian 's provocation at last week's Rueckerconsult INVESTMENT Expo in Berlin. The more interesting conclusion, however, was that the distinction itself may no longer matter. What emerged was not a rotation from one strategy to…