BERLIN (dpa-AFX) - Buying a home has become more affordable in some German regions. This is according to data compiled by the Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI) for Postbank's Housing Atlas. "Lower purchase prices and higher incomes make it easier for average earners in many regions to find a condominium that ideally only ties up a quarter of their net household income for financing," said Manuel Beermann, responsible for Postbank's real estate business, in a statement on Friday. This was first reported in "Die Welt".

According to the report, the share of interest and repayments (annuity) in income fell by an average of 5.1 percentage points to 19.4 percent in Germany last year. The annuity is the annual repayment due to the lender. According to the economists' calculations, the proportionate income burden was below the threshold of 25 percent in 331 of the 400 cities and districts surveyed.

The best situation nationwide is in the Thuringian district of Greiz. Buyers there paid 7.9 percent of their household income to finance the purchase of a condominium. People in the Vogtland district of Saxony (8.0%) and the Elbe-Elster district of Brandenburg (8.4%) also had to spend comparatively little of their income to finance a home.

27% of German households lived in the 69 independent cities and districts in which the average household had to pay more than a quarter of their disposable income to finance their home. According to the calculations, the district of Nordfriesland - which includes the islands of Sylt, Amrum and Fohr - is at the top of the list. To finance a condominium, buyers had to pay an average of 59.8 percent of their household income. People in the Bavarian capital of Munich paid the second highest at 46.7 percent, followed by Berlin in third place (46.4 percent). In Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main, the rate was around 40 percent in each case.

Share also fell for rents

For tenants, the average income share for net rent also fell from 14.4% to 14.1%. With the exception of Berlin (26.4 percent) and Munich (25.8 percent), the income burden remained below the 25 percent threshold. According to the data, however, buyers in 37 of the 400 regions had to spend a lower proportion of their net income on financing a home than on rent.

For their calculation for the past year, the experts assumed an interest rate of 3.5 percent and an initial repayment rate of 2.5 percent. In order to calculate the income compared to the purchase price, they assumed an apartment size of 70 square meters. Costs for estate agents or renovation work were not taken into account. For the year 2022, the economists also assumed a 70-square-metre apartment, but they calculated with a repayment rate of 2.1 percent and an interest rate of 4.6 percent./sak/DP/mis