Foreign Real Estate Investment in Germany

近年来，真实的房地产已成为国际资本的主要目的地。外国资本的这种流入在东道国引起了一些关切。一些城市政策目标，例如确保真实的房地产质量标准或维持当地居民可持续的住房价格，可能与国际投资者的价值储存或投机动机相冲突。此外，定性证据，特别是来自2021年潘多拉文件的证据表明，真实的房地产是非法资金流动的主要模式。尽管有大量定性的例子和决策者方面的一些关切，但对国际真实的房地产投资的定量研究却很少。由于离岸结构所带来的保密性以及公司注册处的不发达状况，难以进行定量分析。这里提议的项目（a）开始登记公司对德国真实的房地产的投资（B）建立并评估这些公司结构的国际所有权链，（c）利用关于避税地资本流动的文献中使用的工具评估外国投资对价格和不平等的影响。因此，该项目将有可能通过公司所有权的国际链，追踪真实的房地产所有权，直至最终受益所有人，并确定这种投资的影响。 这个数据库，然后用来回答三个研究问题，特别是关于德国。首先，我将讨论文献中记载的德国真实的房地产市场异常高的价格上涨是否以及有多少外国真实的房地产投资推动了价格上涨的问题。其次，我问德国的真实的房地产市场作为一个租户（相对于业主市场）如何加剧投资者的价值储存/投机动机和主办城市的住房目标之间的冲突。第三，我将开始探索性分析，以确定国际和德国国内的真实的房地产投资在多大程度上促成了德国的不平等趋势。该项目追求两个目标：它开始了在德国创建公司真实的房地产持有有用的登记册的逾期过程，并提供了几个角度，显示如何利用这样的数据库进行政策相关的经济研究。

In recent years, real estate has emerged as a central destination for international capital. This inflow of foreign capital triggered several concerns in host economies. A number of urban policy objectives, such as ensuring real estate quality standards or maintaining sustainable housing prices for the local population, can conflict with store of value or speculative motives of international investors. Additionally, qualitative evidence, notably from the Pandora Papers in 2021, shows that real estate is a central mode for illicit financial flows. Despite an abundance of qualitative examples and a number of concerns on the side of policy makers, quantitative research on international real estate investments is scarce. The secrecy introduced through offshore constructs and the underdeveloped state of corporate registers makes quantitative analyses difficult. The project proposed here (a) starts work on a register documenting corporate investment in German real estate (b) it establishes and evaluates international ownership chains of these corporate structures and (c) uses tools employed in the literature on tax haven capital flows to evaluate the impact of foreign investment on prices and inequality. The project will therefore make it possible to trace ownership of a real estate title through its international chain of corporate ownership to their ultimate beneficial owner and to ascertain the impact such investment has. This database is then used to answer three research questions about Germany in particular. First, I will address the question if and by how much foreign real estate investment fueled the unusually high price increases in German real estate markets documented in the literature. Second, I ask how Germany’s real estate market as a renter (opposed to an owner market) exacerbates conflicts between store of value/speculative motives of investors and housing objectives of host cities. Third, I will start an exploratory analysis to establish how much international but also intra-German real estate investment contributed to inequality trends in Germany. This project pursues two aims: It starts the overdue process of creating useful registers of corporate real estate holdings in Germany and it provides several angles that show how such a database can be exploited for policy relevant economic research.