Deutsche Wohnen

If you listen to other people, Berliners, they would talk about in the 1990s and 2000, Berlin also sold off vast numbers of publicly owned flats.

And one particularly notorious example was the sale of around 60,000 apartments to Deutsche Wohnen in 2006 for roughly 450 million euros.

That sounds like a lot of money, but it actually translates to 7,500 euros a flat.

This isn't renting, this is buying, buying the flats.

Setting this up is not easy.

To even get onto the ballot, you have to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures.

But they overcame all these hurdles, and eventually, somewhere between 56% and 59% of people Berliners voted to Deutsche Wohnen and Eignen to expropriate properties owned by large commercial landlords in the city.

And from their perspective, what's happened since is that successive governments have spent years and years basically finding ways not to implement the result of the referendum.

Although they get huge federal contributions for tolerating the, the capital there.

2013, an enterprise called the Deutsche Wohnen bought these from the private equity f- people.

And in '21, so another eight years, but afterwards, the Deutsche Wohnen, Vonovia bought the Deutsche Wohnen, and so they got into the possession.

Well, in '21, the government started a, a repurchase of these apartments.

So in September '21, the state of Berlin bought f- round about 15,000 apartments back from Vonovia for whatever, between 2.5 and 3 billion euros.