Land prices and standard land value and tips for land search

I know some small towns whose beautiful, established town centers have become dead zones due to vacancies. They were still doing well until about 10 years ago, with a bakery, post office, café, flower shop, butcher, household goods store, etc. The old owners retired, vacancies followed. And empty shop windows are the death blow for attractiveness. New development areas are spreading on the outskirts. Why aren’t there many more funding programs that modernize this living and residential space? That also exemplify that these old towns or small towns allow for modern living? Why aren’t there more architectural competitions in this direction? Just to name one example.

Because commercial vacancy problems cannot be solved with funding programs and architectural competitions.

Because you can't solve commercial vacancy problems with funding programs and architectural competitions.

No, but you could rezone commercial spaces into residential areas. You don't create living space only by designating new development areas. That is not the cure-all, and in the future it will simply be more necessary to think and plan creatively. There are many good examples where this works.

no, but commercial spaces could be converted into residential areas.

Unfortunately, in inner small and inner medium-sized towns, the buildings often still stand on old parcels that were created without prior land redistribution. In fragmented ownership, every twenty meters of street frontage or less belongs to a different owner, whom you would have to contact. The owner of one house is still alive (here), the next belongs to some commercial real estate holding company (elsewhere, but usually still in the country, in large cities it is even more complicated), and for the one after next you would first have to determine the will of a scattered co-heir community. By the time these three adjacent small vacancies are legally prepared to be concertedly demolished and replaced, the children of the potential tenants are already of building age themselves and desperately looking for building land in the suburbs (I would not like to apply the term "commuter belt" to Niederposemuckel "city"). Even in a small district town of about 50,000 inhabitants, the time to market from vacancy beginning to revitalization averages about a dozen years. Markets petrify when they flow too sluggishly.

no, but one could rezone commercial areas into residential space. You don’t create living space only by designating new development areas. That is not the cure-all, and in the future it will simply be more necessary to think and plan more creatively. There are many good examples where this works.

As if all this hadn’t already happened – look at the corner buildings in the not-quite-central neighborhoods of cities; often you can still see the bricked-up entrances, the large window fronts of the former storefronts, or the very old, weathered inscriptions on the exterior walls. Today, all converted. But then there’s no longer any pedestrian infrastructure and the residents have to go out to the green fields outside the city for shopping.

Why you’re inserting an imperative here again, I don’t know either. Nothing is necessary, let alone without alternative. You’ve already received answers regarding your ideas about using foreign property. Recently, I saw a great example in the regional program of a deteriorating half-timbered house in a tense downtown location in Lower Saxony. Market value = zero, owner lives in Canada, house stands empty, sale only for utopian sums. Now of course you could try, especially in the case of vacancy, to apply harsher measures. Hamburg is already doing this – in individual cases.

But that can only be part of the solution. The greater part must be a promotion of the price difference between (mid-) old buildings that are not necessarily worth preserving and new buildings. And this can only arise through significantly more offerings in new construction. Only when price pressure arises in the existing housing stock will there be any room at all for creative solutions within the stock. Currently, many people of the younger generations can no longer afford either new or old buildings. Paradoxically, not even the current residents themselves can afford it; the inappropriate price tag was only recently stuck on the nameplate.

What is completely missing, as this discussion shows very well – there is always talk of new development areas. But they mostly have to be new city districts. Just as was still done in earlier times. Planning-wise, of course, a major challenge, but strangely enough it was still possible after the refugee influx in 1950 or with growing population numbers even in the 1970s. It’s probably more a matter of willingness. There are, of course, beacons of this kind, but ultimately this is the task for every medium-sized city in Germany that has experienced significant population growth in the last five years.
A city planner can really have free rein here, good accents can be set and things consolidated and thought of together. Creating future-proof infrastructure. But you would need courage, and a remedy against NIMBYs – they will come anyway. And money, because planning has become infinitely expensive. Just look at the appendices to a development plan in a village. I am pretty sure that biotope mapping and climate analysis, as well as many other things, were not included 30 years ago. And do they advance planning in any usable form?

City planners will surely always have this image in mind. Significant population growth like during the baby boomer era simply doesn’t exist anymore. Socially, it is difficult to allow tomorrow’s vacancies without objection. Promotion of (affordable) existing properties for young families in the existing stock, possibly with an energy consultant and young architects for redesign (wall out here, since everything is new, invested 100k€, looks like new) as consultants.

However, I also see the problem that many post-war houses have completely unusable layouts. My grandmother’s house in Gütersloh is super central, quietly located, and on a huge plot. It was built back then for 3 generations and decentralized coal stoves. Although it looks pretty from the outside, not only one wall needs to be moved for contemporary living. Don’t even get me started on the complete energetic renovation.

Hiddenhausen near Herford had (has?) the program "Young buys old," which was for a time a model project and an example to follow. We need something like that and targeted densification, not more new development areas on the city outskirts.



Our luxury problems will eventually resolve themselves.

However, we should maybe break the discussion down here from the meta level back to practice. , have you already approached the real estate agents in the search area? Showing up there and getting on the interest list will surprise you. A considerable number of (reasonably) affordable houses are also traded by agents who never appear on imm*scout.

Here on site, a city councilor recently had a (in my opinion great) idea: In many smaller villages, grandparents live alone in the large single-family homes, while the children and their children would like to build/buy, but the market is swept clean. So there should be an attractive option to get the children and their families into the former parental home without "pushing" the grandparents out of their village. The idea was therefore a municipally subsidized apartment building with many small, barrier-free apartments for little money - provided one passed on their house. Of course also to strangers, so for sale. You cannot imagine the wave of indignation that followed.