Hamburg the big loser in new German city ranking
In any ranking of Germany’s top real estate destinations, the Bavarian capital Munich would expect to emerge at the very top – and, not surprisingly, does just that in the latest German City Ranking published by savings bank aggregator Deka Bank and trade publication ImmobilienManager.
The annual ranking uses a proprietary scoring system to rate cities by a variety of criteria – prosperity, labour market, quality of life, accessibility, economic stability, demography, and education levels. This year the 7th annual survey covered 39 German cities with a population of 200,000 inhabitants or more - and while the ranking covers the attractiveness of a location for commercial property, as a function of the scoring criteria, its primary usefulness has traditionally been as an indicator of residential property potential.
The Study’s researchers are at pains to point our how this year’s ranking methodology uses a refined and modified scoring method which avails of richer input from associated databases, different weighting of certain criteria, and more detail than in previous years.
Munich tops the list, with maximum points in four of the seven scoring criteria, followed by Frankfurt am Main. Then come – surprisingly, as they are generally considered B-cities for investment purposes – Mainz and Karlsruhe. Mainz scores highly for its high educational and labour market ratings, while Karlsruhe has a high overall rating in all categories, which explain its overall ranking. These four are followed by Düsseldorf, Freiburg, Münster, Nuremberg, Cologne and Wiesbaden.
The biggest faller in this year’s ranking is Hamburg, which topples from second place last year to 15th this year. According to the researchers, a poor score for Quality of Life and Accessibility, and below average scores in other categories, caused Hamburg’s slump (Ed: We can understand a low score for Accessibility, although Hamburg has always been located in the same place and has ranked much higher in the past… But we don’t understand the low score for Quality of Life. Only Hamburg’s score for Labour Market fell among the top ten rated cities.). The study can be downloaded from the following link: www.dekabank.de/db/de/research/immobilienresearch/index.jsp