As some of you may have heard, it is hard work trying to find somewhere to live in Munich. Munich is a very popular city and because of this the Mietpreise (rental prices) keep on increasing.

The average price at the moment to rent is about 17€ per square meter in Munich. Berlin, the capital of Germany, on the other hand is on average only 12€ per square meter. As the rental prices increase it is harder and harder for people to find a flat to live in. It is very common to live in Wohngemeinschaften – this is where you live with flatmates so you can split the cost of the rent. Some contracts already include a Staffelmiete. This is when the rent automatically increases by a certain percentage every year.

Photo from Pixabay

There is now a Volksbegehren (petition) from the Mieterverein (tenant association) to try and stop the continious increase of rental prices. They want to freeze prices for at least the next five years. The “frozen” price would be netto and not include heat and electricity. This would help the rental market become affordable again. This wouldn’t effect newly built buildings as they still want to encourage Investors to build new flats.

At the moment if you renovate a building you can increase the rent by 3 euros per square meter. They would like to reduce this by 2 euros. They can’t stop rental prices increasing completely, but they want to try and slow it down. As of yet the political party SPD is supporting this petition and it is expected that more will follow.

To begin with they need 25,000 signatures to make this petition work. If they succeed they would then need 10% of the bavarian population to sign again. This means about 1 million people would need to sign in order for the petition to win.

The petition would first begin later in the year just after Oktoberfest. I think it will be easy for the Mieterverein to get that amount of signatures as everyone in Munich has experienced trying to find a flat here and knows how hard it is. I am one of the lucky ones and managed to find a flat that was big enough and also affordable!

Here is a vocabulary list for this post:

Mietpreise                                                                      rental prices
Wohngemeinschaften (also known as WG)             commune living
Staffelmiete                                                                  annual rent increase
Volksbegehren                                                             petition
Mieterverein                                                                 tenant association
Investoren                                                                     investors
bayerischen Wahlbevölkerung                                 the bavarian voting population

What is the renting situation like in the city or town that you live in?

Thanks for reading,

Larissa