BERLIN, June 4 (Xinhua) -- The number of dwellings constructed in Germany in 2019 increased by two percent to 293,000 compared to the previous year, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) announced on Thursday.
"This was a continuation of the positive development observed since 2011," noted Destatis. The last time that more dwellings had been constructed was back in 2001 when the figure was 326,600 in Germany.
In 2019, the number of apartments in apartment buildings recorded an increase of 6 percent year-on-year, and the number of newly-constructed semi-detached houses declined, according to Destatis.
The number of completed dwellings in 2019 is still well below the government's target of 375,000 new dwellings per year. In the German coalition agreement, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD) set a target of 1.5 million new apartments by the end of the current government's four-year term in 2021.
Two weeks ago, the German association of independent real estate and housing companies (BFW) noted that Germany's small and medium-sized real estate sector was increasingly affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
According to a BFW survey, among the "biggest problems" for property developers were planning and approving new projects. Four-fifths of property developers in Germany reported that building permits, establishment of planning law and urban land-use planning at municipal level was taking "even longer than usual."
However, the number of issued building permits in Germany last year increased to more than 360,000, and was thus "significantly higher than the number of buildings completed," Destatis noted.
That led to a backlog in the number of approved but not yet completed dwellings which grew to around 740,000, according to Destatis. In Germany, the construction backlog has been growing since 2008 after reaching an all-time high in 1998. Enditem
