Construction costs are currently skyrocketing

Nothing hurts as much as the hard landing on the ground of reality. Somewhere an Instagram story flies by where someone bought a super cute farmhouse for next to nothing, does a bit of cosmetic work, and finally celebrates village festivals wearing tie-dye pants and ribbons in their hair. Then you ask the developer and they say: "Here, super cheap, sign here!" and then comes the realization of the construction service description, you notice what is not included, upgrade here and upgrade there, later realize "oops, there are no landscaping services included," and nobody says that in the Insta story.

"During the boom phase, no sacrifice was necessary when buying property, but that was a historical exception."

Yes, it mainly hurts right now because this changed quite abruptly last year. I have also seen the indexes you mentioned analyzed several times in different variations over the past few weeks. There is the OECD index, which ignores interest rates; there you can see that in principle, since 2010, property prices have grown faster than wages (but right now the opposite is happening). However, if you include the development of interest rates (which Deutsche Bank Research apparently did – why are the original data so hard to find there, I only ever find them in articles that cite a source, but finding the source itself is somehow meh – I do find other kinds of statistics) anyway, again, if you include interest rate development, houses were still as affordable as ever because the monthly payment remained affordable despite rising house prices. That has now changed quite abruptly. But yes, compared to history, not only since 2010 but including a few more decades, it's still "not bad" – you just must not compare it to one and a half years ago or something like that ;)

I also think the whining will decrease again. This is more shock now and the comparison with, say, the end of 2021. My colleague simply pays 1000 euros less interest per month for virtually the same loan amount. That makes me briefly envious too, but we have found (so far) that we will probably manage it anyway. Yes, with more restrictions, but in the "it will work out" range. I think the realization will come sooner or later for some people as well. That it actually does work if you either lower your expectations for the house or are alternatively willing to make other sacrifices.

District Sonneberg? No wonder ^^

I don't think anyone wants to move there anymore, except the volkisch.

Turnkey? Here, they first built a house with absolutely NOTHING else. No outdoor facilities of any kind, no garage, only the ground floor was finished. At some point, a "garage" was added, namely a hut made of multilayer compressed and lacquered cardboard. The ground floor had a coal stove in the kitchen that heated the other rooms over water pipes, more poorly than well. At some point, the upper floor was then developed, but with an oil stove in the living room and an electric heater for the very cold nights. So yes, house prices were lower back then – but what you got for it was also something different.

Therefore: Turnkey? Ready to move in? Maybe in the 80s/90s, but still with a different standard.

Sounds like people lived in mud huts back then. My father bought a turnkey end-of-terrace house in 1972 with oil central heating, finished basement, ground floor and upper floor, terrace and landscaped garden as well as a garage. So that existed 50 years ago. He was then a weekend commuter and had no desire to tinker around forever himself.

Yes, the harsh cuts are always annoying. During Corona, wholesalers first sold off their material at dumping prices because they feared their warehouses would overflow; some stocked up (quote: "I always need pipes, pipes don’t go bad, the wholesaler sells them at <50% of the normal price, so I built a hall and filled it with pipes") and the wholesalers canceled everything they could cancel. Suddenly, demand popped up again, no one could deliver, prices exploded. Wholesalers no longer guaranteed prices, companies buy directly from manufacturers because they only get daily rates everywhere, and so on. A year ago, no one wanted a gas boiler but a photovoltaic panel was worth its weight in gold. Now you can get photovoltaic panels at Aldi but heat pumps are stolen right from in front of the house and a simple Zehnder Charleston is only available for four digits. Sure, if it hits you exactly in this time, it's nasty. As is often the case, a bit of calm is quite good and also postponing a project by a year.

Sounds like people used to live in mud huts back then. My father bought a turnkey end-of-terrace house in 1972 with oil central heating, finished basement, ground floor and upper floor, terrace and landscaped garden as well as garage. So it existed already 50 years ago. He was a weekend commuter at that time and didn't want to tinker around forever himself.

Of course it existed, it was just more of an exception. Today people look at you strangely if you made something yourself.

And no, it was not a mud hut but a house. It still stands today and I am just looking over at it. But for example with a shared load-bearing wall with the neighbor – saves money, but doesn’t show up in any statistics. Wood subfloors where you hear every step from the floor above. So yes, nice houses, a dream back then, but anyone who looks only at the price is comparing apples and oranges.