Dramatic rent hikes even for WG-Zimmer in German university towns

Apart from tracking the prices for a small private apartment unit in official student accomodation in Germany, REFIRE also keeps a beady eye on the costs of renting a room in shared accomodation for students - traditionally a cheaper option. These prices are also rising rapidly, as research from Empirica shows.

Over the past five years, according to Empirica research, rents for student accommodation in university cities have risen by around a quarter. Offers are becoming increasingly scarce on the open market, the researchers document.

Many students opt to share an apartment with others, renting a so-called WG-Zimmer, and sharing common facilities with other students. But even this is becoming more expensive. Empirica's survey of 120 cities shows that prices for rooms in shared flats have not only risen significantly in traditional university cities: nationwide, the survey recorded a 21% increase in asking rents for student accommodation, while prices rose by an average of 20% in the large independent cities. Munich and Frankfurt topped the list of the most expensive cities to rent a WG-Zimmer.

At university locations, rents at the start of the 2024 summer semester were 26% higher than in the 2019 summer semester and 8.5% per cent higher than in the previous year. The average warm rent on offer is now €485 per month.

Munich remains particularly expensive at €760 on average, with Frankfurt at €670 - a rise of €90 on a year ago, followed by Hamburg and Berlin at €598 each. Students in Wolfsburg can live favourably with a warm rent of €219, while Halle (Saale) also stands out positively at €313. In Leipzig, the rent for shared flats is slightly below average at €425, although it has increased by 52% since 2019. Nationwide, it has risen by 26% in the same period.

Although Munich is the most expensive city for students, prices in the Bavarian capital have not risen as fast as the national average. Rents in Munich have risen by 15% since 2019. The situation is very different in Leipzig: At €425, the rent for shared flats there is still slightly below the average, but the increase since 2019 has been around twice as high as the national average (up 52% ). According to Empirica, the city of Braunschweig has the lowest inflation rate (up 8% with an average rent of €373). This is followed by Siegen (up 10%, €330 warm rent) and Nuremberg (up 14 %, €445 warm rent).

Empirica updates the overview regularly, although nationwide, only 35 university cities still provide a relevant number of flat share advertisements for the summer semester. As in the "normal" housing market, the market for shared flats is apparently also frozen - appearing much less frequently in official media, says Empirica. This seems particularly true in the cities in the eastern German states, where only Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Halle provide any meaningfully reliable figures.

The figures are roughly in line with another study just published by the Moses Mendelssohn research institute, which tracks property prices, and specialist flat-sharing portal wg-gesucht.de. That survey covers all university locations in German with at least 5,000 students, excluding distance learning and administrative universities, giving it coverage of 89.4% of all the 2,774 registered students in the country.

Matthias Anbuhl, chairman of German student union Deutsche Studierendenwerk, commented: "We are now experiencing a new form of social selection: The question of which university I can study at depends more and more on whether I can even afford the rent in the city. The freedom of the younger generation is being so severely restricted. This is an educational policy misery."