Consumers are feeling the effects of high inflation, especially in energy and food. If you have an index rental contract, you will also be asked to pay more for the housing costs.
The Greens are calling for the regulation of index rents linked to inflation. “Index rents are a problem that we have to tackle,” Katharina Dröge, co-chair of the Greens parliamentary group in the Bundestag, told the newspapers of the Funke media group. “Inflation has risen so much that it will be a shock for many tenants when the increase comes.”
It goes beyond what was stipulated in the coalition agreement, “but we have to discuss with the coalition partners how we can regulate index rents,” said Dröge. That could mean, for example, that existing index leases are capped and new ones are more tightly regulated. “We need a solution at this point.”
Different ideas in the Greens and FDP
Federal Building Minister Klara Geywitz (SPD) had previously shown herself open to capping index rents. You could imagine linking index rents to the general rental price development or setting a cap here, too, she told the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung”. But that is not in the coalition agreement, and the FDP sees no need for action, said Geywitz. Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP) had already rejected calls from the SPD for a reform of index rents in December.
According to the German Tenants’ Association, more and more newly concluded leases are linked to inflation. In larger metropolises, so-called index rents were agreed for an average of 30 percent of new contracts last year, the tenants’ association said in mid-January. For Berlin, the tenants’ association assumes that even up to 70 percent of the new leases provide for indexation.
Inflation, which is relevant for index rents, reached its highest level since the founding of the Federal Republic last year. Consumer prices rose by 7.9 percent on average over the year.
De FDP parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr reads “guilty conscience about the catastrophic own balance sheet” from the demand of the Greens a week before the repeat of the parliamentary elections in Berlin. It does not help to regulate prices if the housing stock is not increased. “It is therefore essential that the homework is finally done: build, build, build,” Dürr demanded.
Source: Stern
