In World's Best-Run Economy, Home Prices Just Keep Falling -- Because That's What Home Prices Are Supposed To Do - Germany
02-03-2014
Eamonn Fingleton, Contributor
London, NYC, Tokyo, wherever – the world is my oyster.
When Americans travel abroad, the culture shocks are rarely pleasant. Robert Locke’s experience was different. In buying a charming if rundown house in the picturesque German town of Goerlitz, he was surprised – very pleasantly – to find city officials second-guessing the price. The price he had agreed was too high, they said, and in short order they forced the seller to reduce it by nearly one-third. The seller was being penalized for the fact that he had earlier promised the authorities he would do extensive renovations but had not followed through.
As Locke, a retired historian, points out, the Goerlitz authorities’ attitude is a striking illustration of how differently the German economy works. Rather than keep their noses out of the economy, German officials glory in their power to influence market outcomes. While the Goerlitz authorities are probably exceptional in the degree to which they micromanage house prices, a fundamental principle of German economics is to keep housing costs stable and affordable.
It is hard to quarrel with the results. On figures cited in 2012 by the British housing consultant Colin Wiles, one-bedroom apartments in Berlin were then selling for as little as $55,000, and four-bedroom detached houses in the Rhineland for just $80,000. Equivalent properties in New York City and Silicon Valley were selling for as much as ten times German prices.
Goerlitz: picturesque — and tightly controlled. (Photo credit: chrisbulle)
Although conventional wisdom in the English-speaking world holds that bureaucratic intervention in prices makes for subpar outcomes, the fact is that the German economy is by any standards one of the world’s most successful. Just how successful is apparent in, for instance, international trade. At $238 billion in 2012, Germany’s current account surplus was the world’s largest. On a per-capita basis it was nearly 15 times China’s and was achieved while German workers were paid some of the world’s highest wages. Meanwhile German GDP growth has been among the highest of major economies in the last ten years and unemployment has been consistently among the lowest.
On Wiles’s figures, German house prices in 2012 represented a 10 percent decrease in real terms compared to thirty years ago. That is a particularly astounding performance compared to the UK, where real prices rose by more than 230 percent in the same period.
A key to the story is that German municipal authorities consistently increase housing supply by releasing land for development on a regular basis. The impetus ultimately comes from central government which provides extensive financial support to municipalities based on an accurate count of the number of residents in each area.
The German system moreover is deliberately structured to encourage renting rather than owning. Tenants enjoy strong rights and, provided they pay their rent, are virtually immune from eviction and even from significant rent increases.
Meanwhile demand for owner occupation is curbed by German regulation. German banks, for instance, are rarely permitted to lend more than 80 percent of the value of a property, thus a would-be home buyer first needs to accumulate a deposit of at least 20 percent. To cap it all, ownership of a home is subject to a serious consumption tax, while landlords are encouraged by favorable tax treatment to maximize the availability of rental properties.
How does all this contribute to Germany’s economic growth? Locke, a prominent critic of America’s latter-day enthusiasm for free-markets and a former professor at the University of Hawaii, notes that a key outcome is that Germany’s managed housing market translates into a more predictable supply of labor. By virtually eliminating bubbles, the German system minimizes the sort of misallocation of resources that is more or less unavoidable in the Anglo-American boom-bust cycle. German house-builders moreover have little incentive to accumulate the huge large land banks that are such a destabilizing distraction for U.S. house-builders like Pulte Homes, D. R. Horton, Lennar, and Toll Brothers. House-builders in Germany just focus on building good-quality homes cheaply, secure in the knowledge that additional land will be available at reasonable prices whenever it is needed.