First of all: I mixed up the numbers: It is 35% who own a condominium! (Sorry, it wasn’t my day…)
And now we also have to consider that the typical homebuilder is young and has not yet reached his average lifetime net income. Because in the 38% are also those who have owned the house for a longer time.
Which would only become an argument if this young homebuilder at some point in his life makes a salary "jump." But this alternatively presupposes extreme wage increases (up to 60%
net difference) or assumes from the beginning an income close to the respective threshold.
And now comes the killer argument of all: I was only an employee for construction financing at a classic branch bank for 18 months, and in rare cases was the income > 4,000 Euro for new financings.
I believe you, but it is just a locally and temporally limited insight. Not to forget that a construction financing does not necessarily result in a new build.
And the statistics speak for me.
It is 65% who own a single-family house and 35% with a condominium. Now there certainly are very expensive condominiums/very cheap single-family houses, but normally the new build of a single-family house is the one that costs the most money and thus also tends to require higher income. The question is only, how many new builds are included here?
So I dug a little further into statistics.
In the 23 years from 1991-2014, a total of 2.956 million building permits for "residential buildings with one dwelling" were issued (this should mean single-family houses). That makes on average about 130,000 new builds per year (in the 90s and early 2000s more than today).
If you extrapolate the average of these years—130,000—to the 80 years a house should last, that makes 10.4 million and thus almost the 11 million single-family houses owned by German households. That seems to correspond pretty well on average.
But nobody owns a house that he built himself for 80 years. I would generously assume 60 years here and then arrive at around 7.8 million households with single-family houses that they have also built themselves. This includes both those who are already enjoying retirement in the paid-off cottage and those who have just started paying off their loan.
But if we now know that 6.6 million households
currently have an income of 3200 and more, most retirees and pensioners in this group (and above) should not be included. The question here now: How many retiree households are there?
The dear statistics tell us that a woman after her retirement at 65 in 2010 still had about 21 years to live. In the early 90s it was about 18 years. Assuming that a household is only dissolved after the death of all members and the man statistically lives fewer years, around 20 of the 60 years of use fall on retirement. That leaves 40 years with an average of 130,000 new builds by owners who still live in their houses and are not retired, that makes 5.2 million households.
If we now, as I wrote above, assume that rather the higher incomes are those who can (and want to) afford a new build, it makes sense to assign the number of new builds descending by income levels.
We know that 3.7 million owner households have a net income of 4500 and more, so 1.5 million owner households remain who have less than 4500 but more than 3200 net income and are not retired.
Now certainly some households with 4500 and more may have bought a condominium in Hamburg or Frankfurt, and maybe some with less than 3200 net a nice house in the East, but I think by and large such "outliers" should be limited.
These are of course not reliable data, but I would still claim that the statistics, if they at all allow any conclusions, rather support the assumption that a large part of the builders have a net income around 4000 euros and above.
This is also supported by the average net incomes of families (<20 years in the house), whose numbers are known (3700-4500 net), if you consider that couples without children also buy a house and their income is not reduced by part-time jobs/mini-jobs.