GERMANY IS BUILDING ITS WAY INTO A HOUSING CRISIS
206,600 completed apartments in 2025.
That is not a figure we should simply gloss over.
In 2025, 18.0% fewer apartments were completed in Germany than in the previous year. This places construction activity at its lowest level since 2012.
At the same time, many cities lack precisely what people urgently need: affordable housing.
The demand is there. The need is there. Yet less and less is being built.
Particularly alarming:
At the end of 2025, 760,700 apartments had been approved but not yet completed. Of these, only 307,200 were actually under construction.
The realization phase is also taking longer and longer:
In 2025, an average of 27 months elapsed between the approval and the completion of a newly built apartment within a residential building. In 2020, this figure was still 20 months.
And while we in Germany engage in increasingly intense debates about how existing housing stock should be regulated, cataloged, or socialized, it is worth taking a look at Poland:
There, 208,400 apartments were completed in 2025. Poland thus created more new apartments than Germany—even though Germany has more than twice the population. While completions in Germany plummeted by 18.0%, the figure in Poland actually rose compared to the previous year. According to the latest annual figures from the Polish Statistical Office, approximately 8,300 more apartments were completed there in 2025 than in 2024.
Naturally, the underlying conditions in the two countries are not identical.
However, the comparison clearly reveals what is lacking in Germany:
Not debates about housing—but rather the conditions under which new housing can actually be created. Faster approval processes. Less bureaucracy. Predictable requirements. Improved tax frameworks for new residential construction. And projects that remain economically viable for developers, property owners, and investors. For the housing shortage will not be solved by endlessly documenting, regulating, or allocating resources that are already in short supply; it will only be solved when construction resumes.
Why are other countries successfully creating new housing, while Germany continues to regulate itself ever deeper into a housing crisis?
Delano Kyles · CEO & Managing Partner