Over the last decade, German housing prices have increased unprecedentedly. Drawing on quality-adjusted housing price data at the district level, we show that regional fundamentals explain up to two-thirds of between-region and 77 to 87 percent of within-region variation in price growth. Price increases were driven mainly by co-movements in local demand fundamentals, notably population density and skill level. However, we further reveal systematic variation unrelated to fundamentals: overvaluation of top 7 cities, path dependency, and spatial spillovers. We infer that speculation, investor preference for liquid markets, and bounded rationality contributed substantially to the recent housing price boom in Germany.

The German manufactured homes market, valued at approximately €8 billion in 2025, is experiencing robust growth, projected to maintain a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) exceeding 4% through 2033. This expansion is fueled by several key drivers. Firstly, increasing urbanization and housing shortages in major cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Frankfurt are creating significant demand for affordable and quickly deployable housing solutions. Manufactured homes, with their shorter construction times and potentially lower costs compared to traditional homes, effectively address this need. Secondly, growing environmental concerns and a push for sustainable construction practices are boosting the appeal of manufactured homes built with energy-efficient materials and designs. Finally, evolving consumer preferences are favoring modern, customizable manufactured homes that offer comparable quality and aesthetics to site-built homes. While challenges exist, such as regulatory hurdles and public perception, the overall market outlook remains positive. The market segmentation reveals strong demand across both single-family and multi-family units. Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Frankfurt are leading the market, driven by their high population densities and significant housing deficits. Key players like Baufritz, Fertighaus Weiss GmbH, Portakabin, Hanse Haus, ALHO Modular Buildings, DFH Group, Swietelsky AG, Daiwa House Modular Europe, HusCompagniet A/S, and Karmod are actively competing in this dynamic market, further contributing to its growth trajectory. The continued focus on innovation, sustainable construction practices, and addressing the housing crisis will be vital for the long-term success of the German manufactured homes market. The market's trajectory indicates significant investment opportunities and expansion potential for companies involved in manufacturing, distribution, and supporting infrastructure. Recent developments include: July 2022:Bouygues' acquisition of Equans, The merger is also subject to review by the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK, which has also issued a decision on its investigation on 19 July 2022. Bouygues offered to divest Colas Rail Belgium in its entirety, including all assets, personnel, and ongoing and future contracts of both its railway contact lines and track installation businesses. As a result, Colas Rail Belgium will remain an independent competitor to Bouygues and Equans in the relevant market in Belgium., May 2022:OECON sold to Portakabin. The acquisition of OECON is a key strategic move and part of the Portakabin Group's European expansion plans. OECON will complement the current Portakabin operations in France, Belgium, and Holland and provide the necessary routes to market for the extensive range of Portakabin modular buildings within the office, healthcare, and education sectors in Germany.. Key drivers for this market are: Increasing Demand of prefabricated Housing in GCC, Government Initiatives Driving the Construction. Potential restraints include: Low construction tolerance, supplier dependance and expensive development. Notable trends are: Rapid Urbanization in the Region is Driving the Market.

In 2023, Germany had the largest housing stock among European countries with a total of 43.6 million housing units. Other countries heading the ranking were France, Spain, and the United Kingdom (UK). This was not surprising, considering that the top four countries have some of the largest population in Europe. In terms of the number of housing units per 1,000 citizens, however, the top three countries were Bulgaria, Spain and France. Which European countries build the most housing? Supply of new housing varies greatly in different countries. In 2023, Ireland and Poland delivered the highest number of housing completions, but when it comes to construction starts, Ireland topped the ranking, leaving Serbia and Austria in second and third place, respectively. How did house prices change in 2023? Demand for housing remained strong in 2023, causing house prices to grow in almost all European countries. The United Kingdom was one of the few countries where home prices declined - a result of the soaring interest rates and cost of living crisis. Hungary was at the other side of the spectrum, with house prices surging by more than 13 percent.

The property brokerage sector was hardly affected by the coronavirus crisis and the war in Ukraine. Demand for residential property in urban areas is very high, while demand for office and retail space collapsed in 2020. The slump in demand for commercial space was largely absorbed by industry players, as many companies sold their commercial properties and rented them themselves in order to increase their liquidity in the short term. These sale-and-lease-back transactions often required advice from industry players. Due to the weak development on the commercial property market, turnover is expected to fall by 0.9% to 12.8 billion euros in the current year. On average, a decline in turnover of 3.3% per year has been observed over the past five years. The increased regulation of the property market, such as the rent freeze, has also contributed to this. Politicians have also responded to the sometimes low level of qualification of estate agents by making further training certificates a legal requirement.Despite rising property prices, estate agents are still benefiting from a high willingness to invest in property as a capital investment in the current year. One reason for this is the high level of rents. However, the high level of interest rates reduces the incentives to invest in a home if the client is reliant on borrowed capital. The short supply of properties is driving up property prices in many German cities and is a major factor in the high level of brokerage fees that estate agents receive for successful brokerage. In addition, residential property is considered an attractive capital investment, especially for wealthy private individuals and investors, which is considered crisis-proof in times of volatile securities markets and persistent inflation.Over the next five years up to and including 2029, IBISWorld expects industry turnover to increase by an average of 0.2% per year to an estimated 12.9 billion euros. While the number of commercial property sales will fall due to the negative impact of working from home and online retail, industry players will benefit from recovering demand on the residential property market. Demand for residential property will once again benefit from the reputation of residential property as a crisis-proof investment, even if the high level of interest rates will continue to dampen demand somewhat. In order to remain competitive in a highly fragmented market with low barriers to market entry, companies must increasingly focus on high-quality service offerings.

Portugal, Canada, and the United States were the countries with the highest house price to income ratio in 2024. In all three countries, the index exceeded 130 index points, while the average for all OECD countries stood at 116.2 index points. The index measures the development of housing affordability and is calculated by dividing nominal house price by nominal disposable income per head, with 2015 set as a base year when the index amounted to 100. An index value of 120, for example, would mean that house price growth has outpaced income growth by 20 percent since 2015. How have house prices worldwide changed since the COVID-19 pandemic? House prices started to rise gradually after the global financial crisis (2007–2008), but this trend accelerated with the pandemic. The countries with advanced economies, which usually have mature housing markets, experienced stronger growth than countries with emerging economies. Real house price growth (accounting for inflation) peaked in 2022 and has since lost some of the gain. Although, many countries experienced a decline in house prices, the global house price index shows that property prices in 2023 were still substantially higher than before COVID-19. Renting vs. buying In the past, house prices have grown faster than rents. However, the home affordability has been declining notably, with a direct impact on rental prices. As people struggle to buy a property of their own, they often turn to rental accommodation. This has resulted in a growing demand for rental apartments and soaring rental prices.

In the last five years, the industry has stagnated. On average, industry turnover has risen by 0.5% per year since 2020. One reason for the weak figures is the divided development in Germany. While the conurbations are predominantly prospering and experiencing a strong influx, which has recently led to a significant increase in rents for both office and residential properties, the economic development of retail space is stagnating or even declining in many areas. In the current year, the weakness of the bricks-and-mortar retail sector and the problems in the construction industry are causing problems for property landlords. Nevertheless, according to forecasts by IBISWorld, industry turnover will increase by 1% to 99.3 billion euros by 2025.The further increase in domestic migration, coupled with a renewed rise in net household income, will have a significant impact on sales development in the current year. This will enable industry players to increase rents for flats again. Commercial rental income has also continued to recover from the coronavirus crisis, particularly in the retail and hotel sectors, but remains just below pre-crisis levels. The recovery in office property is being slowed in particular by the establishment of the home office, even though the reductions in space discussed in public have hardly been implemented to date. For the period from 2025 to 2030, IBISWorld forecasts average annual growth of 1% and industry turnover of €104.1 billion in 2030. Due to the trend towards rising rents in major cities, tighter regulations, such as a tightening of the rent cap, are to be expected. As a result of this, but also due to the expected trend towards working from home, which will change the office space market, momentum is likely to remain rather weak over the next five years, primarily in the major cities.

This dataset results from an anthropological project that investigated the mediations that advice enables between the state, the market, charitable initiatives, families and ordinary citizens in the UK as well as selected European sites affected by austerity politics, namely Spain and Switzerland. The welfare state is not just a political-economic but a moral formation, which creates multiple boundaries of inclusion and exclusion through a variety of actors, officials and institutions. These boundaries at times challenge, and at other times reproduce, dominant logics of extraction and accumulation. Advisers are often the last call for help for their clients/dependents who find themselves increasingly at the mercy of local authorities, immigration regimes, landlords, banks and debt collection agencies. But competing visions of moral worth and social justice continue to permeate the everyday deliberations of those who administer, support and advocate advice. Struggles and dilemmas over how best to instantiate social justice, provide assistance and balance individuals’ moral judgments against the collective good frequently occur. In analyzing advice as part of a broader landscape of governing the welfare state, our research explored both the dovetailing of and divergence between political, economic and legal imperatives and domains.

To accomplish our research, four main themes (1) Empathy and expertise, (2) Brokerage or self-help, (3) Shifting advice frameworks, and (4) Comparative insights on UK-based problems, were addressed through eight research sub-projects. (2) Ryan Davey ‘Debt advice in Plymouth’; (3) Tobias Eule ‘Face-to-Face Interactions at the State/Market interface in Germany/Switzerland’; (4) Alice Forbess ‘Housing and welfare advice in Portsmouth; (5) Ana Gutierrez Garza ‘Advice as social struggle: housing and debt in Spain’; (6) Deborah James ‘Debt advice in London’; (7) Insa Koch ‘Social housing and austerity politics on council estates in England’; (8) Anna Tuckett ‘Providing immigration advice in austerity UK’; (9) Matt Wilde ‘Advice and the UK Housing Crisis’. These include statements of methodology; tables of contents of fieldnotes; anonymized ethnographic interviews and anonymized fieldnotes.

This two-year anthropological study, building on earlier research by the principle investigator and others, undertakes an ethnographic investigation of advice. Under conditions of continuing economic crisis, scholars and policy-makers are having to reshape their assumptions about the nature of society: particularly in respect of who receives assistance and who funds and arranges it. Where the 'usual' targets of welfare and benefits were the poor or destitute, they now include those who work but cannot make ends meet, and who experience increasing numbers of complex problems for which they need advice. And where the 'usual' provider of such things, at least in the post-war years, has been the state, this is increasingly not the case. As the economic crisis proceeds apace and the state's role is being whittled down, access to the counsel of experts is nonetheless increasingly essential. Without prejudging the outcomes, the project will investigate novel arrangements and their unintended consequences. It will explore innovations in advice giving provided by existing offices (under more traditional state-funded regimes), by new sources and novel agencies (under non-governmental and market-driven schemes), and by the social movements, self-help and informal network-based arrangements to which many are increasingly having to turn for counsel and support. The project proposes intensive research along two axes. Firstly, it explores in detail selected sites and cases in the UK (specifically England where a very particular set of legal/welfare arrangements is in operation), 'drilling down' to examine specific institutional settings, themes and topics at a range of different scales and levels. Topics and sites include a focus on the three specific areas of housing, debt and immigration advice, both within and beyond particular institutional settings, and law courts where litigants have started to engage in self-representation. Secondly, it uses two carefully-selected cross-national comparisons in order to illuminate, and gain a critical perspective on, aspects of UK welfare-related advice processes which are often taken as natural/inevitable by local policy-makers. Across these different settings, the project will: (1) document the ongoing effects on advice giving of the withdrawal of legal aid funds, including the rise of self-litigation; (2) explore the new roles assumed by bureaucrats, intermediaries and self-help groups, who are increasingly important in the advice encounter; (3) investigate whether funding cuts have caused the dwindling of the much-vaunted empathy that advice-givers are often required to deliver and whether, in the process, advisers are becoming less effective at shaping the...

With the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the subsequent financial crisis on Wall Street in 2007 and 2008, economies across the globe began to enter into deep recessions. What had started out as a crisis centered on the United States quickly became global in nature, as it became apparent that not only had the economies of other advanced countries (grouped together as the G7) become intimately tied to the U.S. financial system, but that many of them had experienced housing and asset price bubbles similar to that in the U.S.. The United Kingdom had experienced a huge inflation of housing prices since the 1990s, while Eurozone members (such as Germany, France and Italy) had financial sectors which had become involved in reckless lending to economies on the periphery of the EU, such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Other countries, such as Japan, were hit heavily due their export-led growth models which suffered from the decline in international trade. Unemployment during the Great Recession As business and consumer confidence crashed, credit markets froze, and international trade contracted, the unemployment rate in the most advanced economies shot up. While four to five percent is generally considered to be a healthy unemployment rate, nearing full employment in the economy (when any remaining unemployment is not related to a lack of consumer demand), many of these countries experienced rates at least double that, with unemployment in the United States peaking at almost 10 percent in 2010. In large countries, unemployment rates of this level meant millions or tens of millions of people being out of work, which led to political pressures to stimulate economies and create jobs. By 2012, many of these countries were seeing declining unemployment rates, however, in France and Italy rates of joblessness continued to increase as the Euro crisis took hold. These countries suffered from having a monetary policy which was too tight for their economies (due to the ECB controlling interest rates) and fiscal policy which was constrained by EU debt rules. Left with the option of deregulating their labor markets and pursuing austerity policies, their unemployment rates remained over 10 percent well into the 2010s. Differences in labor markets The differences in unemployment rates at the peak of the crisis (2009-2010) reflect not only the differences in how economies were affected by the downturn, but also the differing labor market institutions and programs in the various countries. Countries with more 'liberalized' labor markets, such as the United States and United Kingdom experienced sharp jumps in their unemployment rate due to the ease at which employers can lay off workers in these countries. When the crisis subsided in these countries, however, their unemployment rates quickly began to drop below those of the other countries, due to their more dynamic labor markets which make it easier to hire workers when the economy is doing well. On the other hand, countries with more 'coordinated' labor market institutions, such as Germany and Japan, experiences lower rates of unemployment during the crisis, as programs such as short-time work, job sharing, and wage restraint agreements were used to keep workers in their jobs. While these countries are less likely to experience spikes in unemployment during crises, the highly regulated nature of their labor markets mean that they are slower to add jobs during periods of economic prosperity.