Federal sell-off of property continues as government touts new efficiency

Germany's Bundesanstalt für Immobilienaufgaben (BIMA) said recently that it had sold about 5,600 apartments to both private individuals and companies between 2013 and end-2022, while at the same time selling nearly 6,600 apartment units from federal ownership to Länder and local councils.

BIMA delivered the figures in response to a formal question tabled by the hard Left party, Die Linke.

In addition to the 12,200 residential units sold to state organisations and private individuals and companies, the BIMA also sold 13,200 plots of land from federally-owned holdings, of which three out of four were sold to private buyers. All told, the sales raised more than €3.3bn.

Other federal agencies charged with managing Germany's federally-owned property assets, such as the Bundeseisenbahnvermögen (BEV), which handles railway-related properties, have also been active. The BEV itself has reduced its own housing stock by more than half since 2012, to now little more than 2,000 apartments. The BEV has sold more than 135,000 ex-railway workers housing units since Germany's big railway reforms in 1994.

Die Linke has been a sharp critic of the coalition government's policy of continuing to privatise state-owned housing assets where most big German cities are struggling with housing shortages. Caren Lay, housing policy spokesperson for Die Linke, is calling for a change of course in government policy to boost a public housing programme, starting with federally-owned housing and land. Die Linke are also accusing the government of dragging its feet on the building of 3,000 apartment on federally-owned land by 2024, with only 76 of the planned apartments built so far.

At a panel discussion at the annual Expo REAL trade fair in October last year, the ruling coalition government presented its plans to accelerate all federal construction planning matters and to simplify its over-complicated procedures. This included the elimination of unnecessary inspection bodies at the Ministry, and to grant more independence to project participants. The BIMA itself was to be given more freedom, with the ability to take out its own loans, and to invest in its own building projects and support municipal building.

Previous efforts to disentangle BIMA from the myriad tentacles of different government ministries have previously failed, fallen victim to internal wrangling over competencies. A new slimmed-down version of the required regulations to turn the ideas into reality was published last October, with the aim being to encourage digitalisation and standardisation among the authority and third-party contractors. An example of how this could work being touted was a wing of the Bundestag on Luisenstrasse in Berlin, which was completed in 27 months rather the typical time of six years such a project would have taken.

Even leaving aside the peculiarities of that project, Petra Wesseler, responsible at the Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung, BBR, for the new published regulations, said it was a realistic goal to be a third faster than before in accelerating federal construction matters, and being a role model in energy efficiency, building culture and digitalisation. In the light of Germany's ambitious goals for climate neutrality for all public buildings by 2045, she said, the new approach is the only way to deal with the huge increase in renovation projects that lie ahead.