Left party attacks federal property agency for slowness of land sales

One organisation taking increasing flak is the Bundesanstalt für Immobilienaufgaben (BIMA), or Federal Real Estate Agency, which finds itself caught up in the battle for affordable accomodation, as pressure remains high to utilise state resources in urban areas with a shortage of housing.

The hard-left party Die Linke in the Bundestag has been criticising the BIMA for not doing enough to create new affordable housing. The group’s spokesperson for housing policy Caren Lay has been demanding that BIMA’s charter be changed so that it becomes a federal housing company, and must build far more affordable property for the country’s 500,000 federal employees.

It’s a tricky one for the BIMA, which is fully-owned by the government, and is in its own right one of the largest real estate owners in Germany. Although it has plans for the construction of between 6,000 and 8,000 of new apartments on its government-owned land, the reality is that in the past two years it has managed to build only 30 (thirty) - hence attracting the ire of Die Linke.

The number of housing units owned by BIMA has been declining for years. Last year it owned 25,994 units, down from 40,696 in 2010.

Of the apartments it sold last year, two-thirds were sold to public buyers. Of the 460 apartments it sold, 306 went to local authorities such as municipalities of public housing companies, according to information released by the Ministry of Finance. In the previous year more than half of its unit sales went to private individuals or private companies.

BIMA can grant local authorities the right of first refusal before offering properties on the open market, but this does not by any means always happen. However, the records show that in the last two years, 1420 of 2489 properties sold were first offered to local authorities. According to the Finance Ministry, "If a municipality was interested in acquiring a property to fulfil a public purpose (for example, to strengthen the local housing supply), the BIMA did look into the possibility of a direct sale.”

For 2020, i.e. this year, BIMA plans to sell properties worth around €300 million, and according to the Ministry, residential construction will play an important role in this. For the creation of social housing, for example, BIMA can also grant price reductions on book value  to municipalities, something which has happened 149 times in the past two years, with discounts of around €92.5 million.

The local authorities are free to decide to what extent they build social housing or apartments on the site. However, BIMA’s working figure is that a total of 7600 freely financed - i.e. not publicly subsidised - flats and 3100 social housing units were built on land sold at a lower price in 2018 and 2019.

Caren Lay of Die Linke says that, while it’s gratifying that local authorities are now creating social housing out of one in three apartments built on former BIMA land, all this is happening far too slowly, and the proportion of sales to private buyers is still too high. "These sites and apartments are lost for a social housing policy. The BIMA must now be transformed into a social housing company with a federal land fund. With the measures taken so far, the reorientation of the BIMA remains just too piecemeal."