The overheated commercial property market with its attendant vacancies and fall in rents has, in contrast to most other German cities, largely passed Essen
by. The local authorities say there is around 3,000,000m2 of office space in the city with only 2% lying empty.
This figure is not likely to change much as about half the 67,000m2 new office space being built has been pre-let. Critics of the building boom in Essen had doubted that the two giant new projects of 1998 – the 15,000m2 Bredeneyer Tor centre and the 45,000m2 Bredeneyer office park – would be absorbed but in fact both were three-quarters pre-let.
The town hall sees the reason for this relative stability in the local property market as being the high number of company headquarters in the city which use their own buildings. Around 11 of the top 100 German companies have their HQs in Essen.
Property agents Blumenauer Immobilien GmbH maintains that “as in the nineties some 50,000m2 to 70,000m2 of office space has come onto the market each year, so Essen has grown at a similar rate to become the most important place in the Ruhr area”.
Rents in the city have tended to go up in peripheral areas with new office developments and fallen somewhat for existing and more central locations.
Handelsblatt, 8 October 1999, p59
