Real estate accounts for a significant proportion of total economic wealth in Germany and has fundamental functions for all economic and social areas. At the same time, comprehensive and in-depth information on ownership and its changes as well as on the objects and their properties is often not sufficiently available for the needs of different policy areas (such as land and housing policy) - also at the various administrative levels.
Against this background, the research project understands the increase of transparency as an improved provision and bundling of information and data bases - for the administrations. This is of great importance for the observation and analysis of the situation on the real estate and land markets, with special consideration of the structuring and change of ownership and the property and real estate characteristics. At the same time, however, the perspective of improving the information base for research purposes and for the interested public should also be taken into account. On the basis of this, it will be worked out how deficits and obstacles in the information bases or their possible uses can also be eliminated for the federal government and how existing data from different information systems can be (better) used - because despite the already numerous existing and even digitized data, there is a lack of a usable overall view at the federal level, which is precisely necessary for the goals described above. For example, the existing report "Legal basis for more transparency on the German real estate market" by CBH Rechtsanwälte on behalf of the BBSR (2021) and the expert report "Database and data requirements of residential land in Germany" of the BBSR (2020) already show corresponding databases. In particular, the real estate cadastres of the federal states and their data basis of the Official Real Estate Cadastre Information System (ALKIS) contain data in locally varying depths to meet a number of the above-mentioned needs (including owner and property information), but are not directly usable by the federal administration and other actors.
The aim of the study is to develop a concrete framework for the implementation of measures to improve real estate and land market transparency in a comprehensive and long-term perspective.
The basis for this within the framework of the project is the creation of an understanding of the current structure and functioning of real estate markets and the identification of potentials for increased transparency, especially for market observation, housing and land market policy and for other aspects in the areas of climate protection and adaptation, social policy, money laundering and tax evasion, hazard prevention, sanctions enforcement. This is intended to create the conditions for enabling the state to shape the state more actively and precisely in all sub-political areas and ultimately to strengthen Germany's economic development and future security.
In addition, the research project is intended to provide a scientific basis for possible further studies that could deepen the challenges identified here empirically and in a practice-oriented manner.
The goal of improved real estate and land market transparency is imperatively linked to an improvement in data availability and quality for market players, for scientific purposes as well as for municipal and political advice as a basis for political and economic decisions (e.g. design of funding programmes, legislation). The results of the study are intended to provide a further impetus for targeted research and development for the creation and networking of data and information offerings.
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