Holiday break

A flat in Berlin goes on holiday…rather, goes into rehab.

I badly need to distance myself from keyboards of all sorts, be they Macs, PCs, Bberrys.

I need to quarantine from airports and planes and personal (as well as Google) searches.

Luggage is ready and stocked with books, giant flasks of shampoo, notepads and El Mulo Rumiz’s feuilleton.

Trains, trains, trains. Europe Europe Europe. Tu-tun Tu-tun!!

Hints on the mysterious holiday destination are left on the fridge…

Detailed reports will follow. Bear with us!

Target price: Eur 1,000/square meter

Real Estate bubbles hurt

The Herald Tribune article was rather clear about it. Prices in Berlin were on a different planet compared to those we were used to in Rome. It could be 1,000 but also 3,000 depending on the area and the flat’s condition, but it was not comparable with the Montecarlo-style prices in Rome.

We had given up the idea of buying a flat in Rome a few years ago, when they went from plain expensive to claerly nonsensical. Then, there had been the garages speculation. Something similar to the tulip mania in Holland in the 18th century . Garages changing hands fast: you buy, then sell at a higher price, then buy another one…A price of a garage could have been close to 100k eur. (A garage?!?!? I would expect you store at least a Bentley in it for that price!)

Well, we’re country mice and not really used to this sort of magheggio. We need to understand the price of what we buy, even for a pair of shoes. So we held on to our rent. Yes, maybe throwing money out of the window. But we have probably the only 100% legal, declared and fiscally transparent rent deal in the city of Rome – our landlord is a…lord – and it’s not too bad.

So Berlin appeared to us the only town in which we could invest our savings without having to top them up with a big mortgage.

Come 40, you badly feel the need to own your own house. Something in between Eur 1,000 and Eur 3,000 per square meter seemed a fair price for satisfying this fortysomethings’ urge.

Schoeneberg, Wilmersdorf, Charlottenburg…

An article of The move Channel…quite a sales pitch, but there’s some truth to it…

Big Berlin investment signals beginning of boom

20/02/2007

After fifteen years of stagnation the Berlin property market is finally starting to stir as foreign investors snap up property in the city, reports Assetz…

After fifteen years of stagnation the Berlin property market is finally starting to stir as foreign investors snap up property in the city, attracted by low start up costs and commercial office space which is considerably cheaper than in Munich and Frankfurt, reports Assetz.

Berlin has seen huge multi-billion pound investments in property from UK and European investment banks such as Terra Firma, which are buying up vast blocks of apartments. In addition, leading multinationals such as Sony and DaimlerChrysler have set up headquarters in the city.

This considerable injection of investment has kick-started property market growth – 2006 saw a tentative 0.2% rise in prices after losses in the previous year. The German economy as a whole expanded by 2.5% in 2006, the fastest growth since 2000, and looks set to increase by a further 2.5% in 2007.

Unemployment in Berlin fell to its lowest in four years in November 2006, and this trend is set to continue. It will be the influx of foreign investors that will in time help to drive a growing preference for home ownership that has not been witnessed before in the city, where just 14% of people currently own their own properties.

Stuart Law, Chief Executive of Assetz commented: “Germany is a new market for most overseas investors and it will take time to develop, so I would advise taking a ten year view rather than expecting instant returns. However, the growth triggers investors have been waiting for are starting to occur, with prices in some residential areas such as Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf and Schoeneberg seeing small rises after years of declining or static prices.

Law continued: “It is a unique situation to have property prices in a capital, as they are in Berlin, which are half those of the surrounding cities of Munich and Frankfurt.  With economic conditions remaining favourable, it is inevitable that the Berlin market will catch up, as the UK-led phenomenon of buying your own home continues to spread rapidly across Europe.”

WestBerlin Charm

One of the biggest regrets: not to have been in Berlin before 1989. So the difference between Ost und West is kind of indirect for us, it comes more from the words of friends who lived in the DDR, from litterature and movies.

So what about the West? when we first visited the town, it was pieced together again, albeit with lots of very visible scars and stitches.

The Bayerisches Viertel was the first image we had of West Berlin. We arrived at Astrid’s B&B and we liked the totally unexpected leafy, no-fuss, and admittedly not very “groovy and exciting” neighbourhood. A relaxing Nepalese restaurant, a good spicy Doner, nice streets full of small gardens, Edeka-Frauen doing their shopping at the local Aldi. We parked our nail-polish red Alfa Romeo and never touched it again for one week – what a nice feeling! Well, that was the time when we still had “a car”. Now we’re transportation vegetarians.

Edeka-Frauen (artist: Kristina Fiand; gallery: Wagner+Marks)

OstBerlin Mystique…

Trabi

Reasons for being fascinated by OstBerlin:

1) corresponding with my DDR penpals for twelve years, until the Mauerfall…(I remember Michael driving his Trabant on west-german Autobahns to engine meltdown and eventually reaching by bus his friend “in the West”, where he would buy his fourth-hand Golf and drive back to Karl-Marx-Stadt in triumph…poor Trabi…! it would be worth a fortune today!)

2) the great Daniel Bruhl in “Goodbye Lenin”

3) the ubergreat “The life of others”…

4) countless cold war movies, hard-boiled spy-stories…