Rent out or sell a condominium? Decision in times of crisis?

(...)
rarely certainly, but my brother at least made it from a secondary school student to professor, it’s not a fairy tale ;-)
And Hauptschule hardly exists anymore (almost not at all?) right now.

In Bavaria, Hauptschule still plays a relevant role.
However, especially in Bavaria, the thoughts of "Bavaria is number 1 in education AND industry" quickly become relative.

A few years ago, I had a training on project management, where you do these silly get-to-know-each-other games.
At the question "Who works where," 90% were in Bavaria... at the question "Who comes from where," suddenly 50% were in northern Germany... and at the question "Where did you study," then 70% were above the "Weißwurst Equator"...

Bavaria is very proud of itself... but by far the largest number of its academics are "foreigners"... because Bavaria forces everyone who doesn’t deliver 110% into vocational training...

Do the test. Ask in a Bavarian company during lunch break in "Bavarian dialect" if "des essn goanz guat wor"...
Then you hear it... no one understands it, because none of them originally comes from Bavaria.

Bavaria is very proud of itself... but by far the largest number of its academics are "foreigners"... because Bavaria forces anyone who doesn't give 110% into vocational training...

Now the only question is whether it should be the goal of society for 70% of a cohort to be academics. Looking at the skilled workers at Audi or Airbus in Ingolstadt, their salaries (I deliberately do not address their competencies) are almost certainly better than those of some academics in Bremen or Berlin...

Now the only question is whether it has to be the goal of society that 70% of a cohort are academics. Looking at the skilled workers at Audi or Airbus in Ingolstadt, their salary (I deliberately do not address their skills) is certainly better than that of some academics in Bremen or Berlin ...

With a 70% rate of academics, the academic level has simply become extremely diluted....

My opinion: prices will not fall. Interest rates are rising in response to inflation, and one significant driver of this is, among other things, the material costs in construction. New builds traditionally compete with existing properties, largely because of the land the properties stand on. Therefore, there will always be a relatively fixed ratio between existing properties and new builds.

To put it bluntly: it doesn’t make sense for a new build in the Cologne metropolitan area to cost 1 million euros while an existing property on the same plot costs only half as much. It is considerably cheaper than 500k€ to bring the existing property up to similar energy standards.

I find your consideration about what this means for rents particularly interesting. I would like to add a thought:

Politics and this forum always refer only to the high-price metropolitan areas. I come from Rhein Ruhr. Here it is common for Ruhrpott residents to go to Cologne, Düsseldorf, or Essen to study (especially the southern part of Essen is also hip and expensive). The price difference is enormous. With the budget for a student apartment in Cologne, you can rent 150 sqm in Gelsenkirchen South. What people do here: they spend and party in their “twenties” in Cologne and move back to the Ruhr area to start a family. Solely because of housing costs.

And this is something politics often forgets: the more rents are “kept low” in the metropolitan areas, the less attractive the surrounding areas become. The Berlin way is rent caps or expropriation, but the alternative would be to see the rent gap as an opportunity for the surrounding regions.

The Ruhr area is certainly an exception here, as many larger cities are close together and well connected. That makes commuting easy. Elsewhere, you have to go out into the sticks for affordable housing, and that only works with a lot of home office. If you can't do that, you spend a lot of time in the car and lose a lot of money and time.

Commuting from Cologne to Gelsenkirchen is absolutely impossible, despite all the networking. 1.5-2 hours one way by the RE (unless you happen to live at one main station and work at the other) or about 80km via fully congested highways by car. This is no different in the Rhine-Ruhr area than in any other metropolitan region and its surroundings.

No, when deciding to "move out," both the place of residence and the job usually have to be changed here as well. Or rather, this move mostly takes place after studying and before the first job.

But be that as it may: such structures do not just appear out of nowhere or are set in stone. The fact is: if rents in Cologne are "capped," even fewer people will want to live in Gelsenkirchen South. For me, the development of rental prices is also a seed of hope that maybe soon, when employers choose their location and when people choose their place of residence, it will no longer be the case that, to exaggerate, the 6 inner cities of Cologne, Düsseldorf, Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Berlin are the destination for 90% of all people and other town centers are increasingly neglected.