BERLIN, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- Germany's housing crisis showed no sign of easing last year, as figures released by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) on Thursday suggest.
In November, the number of residential building permits fell 16.9 percent year-on-year. After 18 months of continuous decline, only 20,200 apartments were approved, according to figures based on partially estimated results.
From January to November, the number of building permits for apartments fell to 238,500, a 25.9-percent drop compared to the same period of 2022.
"The turnaround has still not been achieved, even though there is a huge housing shortage," Felix Pakleppa, chief executive of the German Construction Federation (ZDB), said in a statement. "The housing construction sector is still on high alert."
The business climate in Germany's residential construction has reached an all-time low since 1991, according to the ifo Institute for Economic Research. "The prospects for 2024 are bleak," said ifo expert Klaus Wohlrabe last week.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic and the energy crisis, the construction industry is still struggling with prices that are only slowly normalizing and high financing rates. In November, interest rates for 10-year building loans hit 4.2 percent, the highest in the past decade, according to mortgage broker Interhyp.
If the slump in residential construction continues next year, the industry will face not only a wave of insolvencies, but also the loss of around 100,000 jobs, ZDB President Wolfgang Schubert-Raab said.
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The German government expects to miss its annual construction target of 400,000 new apartments this year by 135,000 units, though Minister of Construction Klara Geywitz said last month that the housing market would brighten up by the end of the year or early in 2025.
The German Property Federation (ZIA) has reported a shortage of 550,000 apartments in Germany, and expects the figure to rise to 830,000 by 2027.
ZIA President Andreas Mattner sees a growing danger of division in society, as behind the statistics are "thousands of people who are looking for an apartment and cannot find one."