Beware the backlash as financiers muscle into rental property

BERLINERS, MOREREIT than four-fifths of whom rent their homes, have an unusual opportunity on September 26th to vent their anger over the rising cost of housing. A referendum, on the same day as Germany’s national and municipal elections, will give them a say on whether or not the city should in effect “expropriate” some of Germany’s largest residential-property firms, affecting up to 240,000 homes. The vote is non-binding. But its impact on the housing market is already having an effect. On September 17th two giant property investment trusts, Vonovia and a firm it is targeting in a €19.1bn ($22.5 billion) takeover, Deutsche Wohnen, said they would sell almost 15,000 flats to the city for €2.5bn. They portrayed it as a friendly gesture. But it was also a thinly veiled attempt to stop being stripped of the keys to their own homes.Whatever the outcome of the referendum, it serves as a warning for institutional investors piling into residential property in Europe and America. Real-estate investment trusts (s), private-equity firms, insurance companies and pension funds see the single-family rental housing market as a relatively high-yielding hedge against inflation that has been spared the impact of pandemic-related lockdowns on offices and shops. But housing affordability has high political sensitivity. In Berlin, rents have roughly doubled in a decade. Across Europe their rise has outpaced wage increases. In America, where a quarter of renters pay more than half of their income to landlords, rents in June were up 7.5% compared with last year, when they rose by 1.4%. The highest increases were in Phoenix and Las Vegas, up by 16.5% and 12.9%, respectively over the same time period. Nationally it is hard to lay the blame for the rent rises on institutional investors. But in some cities where they concentrate their portfolios, faceless megacorps are increasingly being seen as part of the problem.