With a court decision, thousands of seasonal apartments must return to the traditional real estate market. The German capital’s administration hopes the ruling will help combat the city’s housing shortage, while Berlin local authorities and tenants’ rights groups hope a recent court ruling will release thousands of holiday rental apartments on the real estate market. In recent years the German capital has faced an explosion in rental values.
In what the Mitte central district authority called a “pioneering” ruling, a Berlin court ruled last month that the city could force owners to list holiday apartments on the traditional real estate market even before it comes into force in 2014., of the law on “improper use” of real estate, which prohibits the rental of unregistered apartments to tourists.
The CEO of the Berlin Tenants Association (BMV), Sebastian Bartels, called the ruling “very important”. According to his estimates, up to 10,000 apartments could be brought back onto the rental market across Berlin.
The February ruling marked the culmination of an eight-year legal battle over a building in central Berlin where 27 regular apartments were transformed into 37 furnished holiday rental apartments. The smallest is currently rented for around 200 euros (R$1,100) per night, while penthouses cost 3,000 to 4,000 euros (R$16,350 to R$21,800) for three nights.
The owner of the building took the local district to court for refusing to grant protection to the property, arguing that the old law was still in effect. The case reached the German Federal Constitutional Court, which sent it back to the Berlin court, which confirmed the previous sentence, finding favor with the local authorities.
The “law on the prohibition of abuse” enacted by the German capital in 2014 prohibits owners of residential properties from leaving apartments empty or renting them out as holiday apartments without official permission. Exceptions may be provided, for example, for the sublease of a part of the apartment or for the sublease of the entire apartment for a specific period.
Until now, the law only applied to properties that had been transformed into holiday apartments after the law came into force, but the new ruling provides that it can also be applied to holiday rental properties that already existed as such before 2014.
New tools
Mitte district mayor Stefanie Remlinger welcomed the verdict. “With this decision, the court has given us, as a district, the tools to address one of the most pressing social problems in our city: homelessness,” she said in a statement. You said that the city is now “able to combat illegal apartment rentals (…) and recover urgently needed living space for regular rentals.”
The decision could have a potentially important effect. Remlinger told broadcaster RBB that he intends to review around 1,700 multi-apartment properties, two-thirds of which he believes owners could be required to make available on the normal rental market.
This stock is badly needed in the city, as rents in Berlin have increased significantly over the last two years. According to real estate market research organization Empirica-Regio, the average rent in the city has remained stable during the Covid-19 pandemic – costing around 10 euros (R$54) per square meter – but has risen to more than 14 euros (R$76) in the last quarter of 2023.
“Thousands of cases could not be prosecuted before the abuse law came into force,” Bartels explains to DW. “Most of the holiday apartments are located in attractive areas of central Berlin and contribute significantly to the expulsion of residents.”
Bartels also pointed out that property owners are engaging in what he called “deadline surfing,” prolonging the legal battle as long as possible, bouncing from one appeal to another and thus taking advantage of the often tortuous pace of the court system. “All of this took a long time and all the while the abuse continued,” Bartels said. “And we’ve lost thousands of apartments over the last ten years because of it. It’s bitter.”
But the exact numbers are not known, partly because there is no centralized register of all vacant or rental properties in the city, something local authorities would need to be able to count how much living space Berlin has available.
“We simply don’t have the data: We don’t know how many apartments have been lost to Airbnb or other providers. It’s ridiculous not to have this record in such a large city where 83% of residents are renters,” Bartels said. “There is no effort on the part of the city administration to establish such a register.”
EU: new obligation for Airbnb
Airbnb did not comment on the specific court ruling, but referred to previous statements saying that owners offering apartments on its platform are required to register as part of its “responsible tourism and housing protection initiative.” The platform also claims that 40% of users in Berlin use Airbnb to share their private homes to increase their income.
But this wasn’t enough for the European Union (EU), which recently approved new rules for short-term rentals that require platforms like Airbnb not only to register properties, but also to verify compliance with local rules and to list data in a central database. for local authorities. For Barbara Steenbergen, member of the executive committee of the International Tenants Union, this is a great victory.
According to her, the problem so far is that although most large European cities have laws to prevent “abuse”, they are often unable to enforce them because the authorities simply do not know where the apartments are located, who the owners are and if the holiday homes and apartments respect the relevant rental period or space limitations.
“This happened in all big cities, from Amsterdam to Zagreb,” Steenbergen told DW. “Cities have asked the European Commission to create rules that force platforms to disclose data such as: location of apartments, length of time they are rented, on what basis and what the rental income was,” he says.
The idea is that owners can receive a short-term rental registration number that allows them to use Airbnb only if these factors comply with local regulations. Approved last month by the European Parliament, the new rules are expected to come into force within around two years, after the text is adopted by the Council and published in the bloc’s Official Journal.
“This creates much less burden on cities,” he said. “This is extremely necessary if you look at the situation from a macroeconomic point of view. We are currently not building enough new affordable homes – we have had problems with building blocks across Europe. So cities are now trying to ensure that the heritage existing become accessible again.”
Source: Terra
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