What property costs in Berlin

We do not keep a day-by-day price list for each district. We monitor how good the locations are, how much is being built and how strong demand is, in all twelve Berlin districts. A single figure for an entire district says little about a specific address. Between a simple location and a prime location in the same district there is often a difference of several thousand euros per square metre.

We work with three kinds of source. First, the purchase prices from notarial contracts, analysed by the Berlin valuation committee (Gutachterausschuss für Grundstückswerte in Berlin). Second, the official standard land values (Bodenrichtwerte) from BORIS Berlin, meaning the value of the land per square metre without the building on it. Third, the Berlin rent index (Mietspiegel), the official overview of the usual local rent for a flat of this kind.

The three are published at different times: the rent index every two years, standard land values annually on 1 January, and the property market report (Grundstücksmarktbericht) annually. Together they do not produce an up-to-the-day ranking of the districts. You will find a reliable price series for the whole of Berlin in the Berlin housing market report.

The price-to-rent multiplier tells you how many years' rent a purchase price contains. It is calculated with the rent excluding ancillary costs, the net cold rent (Kaltmiete). A multiplier of 25 means: the purchase price equals 25 times the annual rent. If you buy a flat to let, this tells you more than the price per square metre, because the multiplier sets the price against the rental income.

Why this matters becomes clear in practice. The district with the highest price per square metre is not necessarily the district with the highest multiplier. There are locations where the price per square metre is average but the multiplier is high, because purchase prices have risen faster than rents. If you look only at the price per square metre, you will not see this.

The multiplier lets you work out the yield before costs: 100 divided by the multiplier. With a multiplier of 25, that is 4 per cent a year. This does not yet deduct any repairs, property management, vacancy or interest on the loan. For a purchase decision, the multiplier is the start of the calculation, not the result.

Three analyses go beyond the district overview: the housing market, interest rates and the social preservation areas (Milieuschutz). Each names its sources, its date and how often it is updated. Each card says where the detailed figures can be found.

Each district page describes the micro-locations, the character of the district and the questions that matter when buying or selling there.

Where BBI has had its focus since 1995, the analysis goes below district level. These five profiles describe neighbourhoods (Kieze), not administrative boundaries.

• Purchase prices and rents: Investitionsbank Berlin, Housing Market Report. These are asking prices from advertisements, not prices from purchase contracts. The source gives price bands instead of individual prices, so the value is calculated halfway between two bands. Where the lowest band is open-ended at the bottom, we say so in the report.
• Price-to-rent multipliers: we calculate them ourselves from these two series. Mid-point purchase price per square metre divided by twelve monthly rents per square metre. Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB) does not publish this value itself, and it carries the imprecision of the price-band calculation. That is why we label it ‘calculated’ throughout.
• Standard land values: BORIS Berlin, the official information system of the Berlin valuation committee (Gutachterausschuss). A standard land value (Bodenrichtwert) states what the land is worth per square metre, without the building on it. We show the mid-point value across all residential areas of a district.
• Population, number of dwellings, completed dwellings, arrivals minus departures, living space: Office for Statistics Berlin-Brandenburg (Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg).
• Expected population trend: population forecast for Berlin 2024 to 2040. It projects how many people will live in Berlin and says nothing about prices. We do not make price forecasts.
• Interest rates: Deutsche Bundesbank, interest rates on federal bonds maturing in ten years. We retrieve them via the Bundesbank's open data interface. The value is updated each time this website is rebuilt, and the data date is shown on the chart.

We add nothing that is not in the sources. Where a value is missing, the row stays empty rather than being estimated.