Current price trends for commercial real estate in Germany

Commercial real estate prices in Germany declined by 1.2 % on the year in the third quarter of 2026. The year-on-year rate was already down slightly in the second quarter of 2026, while there had been a moderate price increase at the beginning of the year.

In the third quarter, office real estate prices decreased by 3.9 % compared with the previous year. The downturn has thus accelerated markedly in this segment. By contrast, retail real estate prices remained once again at the previous year’s level. The upward movement in prices for multi-family housing has been steadily slowing for around a year now. They recently rose only marginally on the year.

In the third quarter of 2026, the decline in commercial real estate prices was somewhat stronger in cities with supra-regional importance than in other regions of Germany. This reflects that markets for office real estate and multi-family housing in major cities have tended to be comparatively weak.

Results for the fourth quarter of 2026 will be published in February.

Methodological background

The commercial property price index is jointly calculated by vdpResearch and the Bundesbank on a quarterly basis and provides a representative overview of pure price developments in Germany for the following types of real estate: offices, retail property and multi-family houses owned by enterprises. While the index therefore follows the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) definition of commercial real estate, it does not include types of real estate such as industrial and logistics buildings, hotels or restaurants as the number of observations is too small in the dataset.

The index is based on transaction data from vdpResearch’s Real Estate Monitoring Database, in which Pfandbrief banks, cooperative banks, savings banks and private banks report data on real estate sales from their lending business. The price data are stratified by property type and region and are quality-adjusted using hedonic methods. This produces raw index series that are smoothed using a Kalman filter. The smoothing procedure is based on a structural time series model that breaks the raw index down into the market-relevant price movement and a disturbance term that reflects statistical uncertainties.

The commercial property price index is a Laspeyres index with base year 2022. Weightings for types of real estate and regions are constant over the entire period and are based on the stock values for the calendar year 2022. These are derived from the floor space data for the three types of real estate at the municipal level, taken from the 2022 census for multi-family houses and based on sector-specific analyses for office and retail properties. The floor space data are valued using average prices from 2022.

Sub-aggregates are displayed for offices, retail properties and multi-family houses as well as – overall and for the individual types of real estate – according to the following types of region: cities of supra-regional importance, cities of regional importance, cities of local importance, urban areas, village areas. This regional classification is based on the regional statistical spatial typology (RegioStaR) devised by the Federal Ministry of Transport (Bundesministerium für Verkehr,BMV). The property type “multi-family houses” also contains the sub-aggregate “TOP 7 cities” (Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich and Stuttgart).

The commercial property price index is published around 40 days after the end of the reporting quarter; it is also possible to revise the last three quarters each time the new index level is published.