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Germany's housing shortage has become so familiar that it is easy to focus only on what isn't working. Wohngeld is being cut. Rents on new contracts continue to outpace older tenancies. Regulation keeps tightening, even where fresh investment is most urgently needed. Those challenges remain.
Yet recently, we have found ourselves noticing something else. People are building around the problem. Not solving it — not yet, and perhaps not for years. But building around it in ways that strike us as genuinely inventive.
We were reminded of this during a recent day at Heuer Dialog's Jahreskongress Temporäres Wohnen. We expected another discussion about planning law, regulation and Germany's chronic housing shortage. Those themes were certainly there. What surprised us was something else. Speaker after speaker, from developers and operators to investors and policymakers, were asking a far more practical question: given the market as it exists today, how do we create more housing, more quickly and at a price people can actually afford?
The answers varied enormously.
Some are already operating at meaningful scale. Capital Bay, together with Japan's Daiwa House, has just handed over more than1,500 factory-built apartments to a Berlin housing association — manufactured not on site but in a factory near Berlin before being assembled like a kit of parts. Across the city, All3 is using a construction robot, nicknamed Mantis, to erect timber buildings at close to half the usual construction cost and time. Neither of these is an experiment any longer. Both are simply happening.
Other ideas remain smaller, less mature and more fragile, but no less interesting for that. Bricks and Stories, a Munich-based concept agency, is adapting empty office floors into simple private rooms with shared facilities under its "TAKE OVER" brand, targeting rents below €600 a month. Communits, a Berlin business, plans to avoid formal office-to-residential conversion altogether by placing compact sleeping units inside vacant office buildings while deliberately retaining their commercial classification. Both are still at an early stage. Both report encouraging demand, although we should be clear that these are the companies' own figures rather than independently verified evidence. Even their founders acknowledge that, measured against Germany's housing shortage, the numbers remain modest.
What these ideas have in common
Looking back on the discussions afterwards, it struck us that almost every presentation was trying to answer the same question. Not how to wait for better conditions, but how to make today's conditions work better. What linked almost every presentation was not a particular technology or business model, but a different way of thinking about the assets themselves.
Empty offices were no longer simply vacant offices waiting for planning permission. Construction was no longer necessarily confined to the building site. Housing was increasingly being approached as an operational challenge rather than a purely physical one: how existing buildings could be used differently, how projects could be delivered faster, and how accommodation could be matched more closely to the people who actually needed it. The innovation was often less about what was being built than about how it was being operated.
None of these ideas, individually, will solve Germany's housing crisis. Some may never move beyond niche products. Others may quietly disappear. But that is almost beside the point. For years, much of Germany's housing debate has revolved around what governments should do: more subsidies, more regulation, more planning reform, more permits. Increasingly, parts of the industry seem more interested in asking what they themselves can do within the constraints that already exist.
That shift does not remove the obstacles. Several of the concepts presented depend on operating within legal definitions that remain uncertain. At the same conference, a planning lawyer described how Berlin's authorities have quietly begun treating even six-week stays as residential use regardless of how projects are actually managed — a change that has already stalled at least one prominent office conversion. Innovation does not remove regulatory risk. If anything, it often exposes it more quickly.
One remark from the audience has stayed with us since. An investor observed simply that "capital is not social". Private investment cannot be expected to deliver social outcomes if the underlying economics do not work. His preferred solution was not another subsidy but less friction. He pointed to Hamburg, where simplifying certain building requirements has reportedly reduced construction costs by several hundred euros per square metre. No grand new programme. Just fewer obstacles standing between an idea and its execution.
Seen in isolation, these are unrelated stories. Together, they suggest something rather more encouraging. Germany's housing shortage remains profound, but parts of the market have stopped waiting for perfect conditions. Instead, they are experimenting with modular construction, industrial manufacturing, robotics, temporary occupation and new operating models that would barely have featured in the mainstream housing debate a few years ago.
None of this guarantees success, and we would not want to suggest otherwise. Some of today's ideas will fail. Others may prove impossible to scale. But after spending a day listening to people trying to make projects work rather than explaining why they cannot, we came away with an unexpected impression. Germany still has a major housing problem. But what it may also have, increasingly, is a willingness to solve it differently.