General

If owners need additional space in their property, such as for a home office, a hobby room or an apartment, this can often be realized in the basement. This is pointed out by the FMI Fachverband Mineralwolleindustrie. For the basement conversion, however, owners should consider various aspects in advance, namely the building physics, the structural specifications and the...

Thermal insulation of buildings is effective and easy to implement - this is the opinion of the FMI Fachverband Mineralwolleindustrie. Mineral wool can also help to achieve the climate targets in the building sector, writes the trade association on its website "der-daemstoff.de". For this, however, the house must be insulated from the roof through the facade to the basement ceiling. For...

A real estate seller cannot necessarily be held responsible for the remediation of a property if contaminated sites are suspected there. This is because it would have to be examined in advance whether there is actual soil contamination. This has now been decided by the Federal Court of Justice (V ZR 213/21) and the case has therefore been referred back to the Munich Higher Regional Court (OLG). In the case at hand, a...

Whether lightweight furniture panels, plant pots or decking boards - they can all be made (in part) from fast-growing poplars or from their ground bark and twigs. This is what several experts have discovered over the past few years in the Dendromass4Europe (D4EU) research project. It was conducted under the leadership of Norbert Weber, Professor of...

The Urban Land Institute (ULI) and the company JLL provide information about co-living in a best-practice guide. In co-living, people live together for a time in a property, usually in a city. There are many reasons for this: housing that is too expensive, being alone or the desire for greater energy efficiency all lead to co-living. Co-living is aimed, for example, at...

According to a survey by the Bauherren-Schutzbund, more and more modernization projects are being postponed or abandoned altogether. In August 2022, only 34.3 percent of the homeowners surveyed with a property that was 15 years old or older said they wanted to carry out modernization measures. About half a year earlier, it was still 50.2 percent. In addition, more than half of the...

Owners of buildings with a central gas heating system and six or more residential units must have the heating system hydraulically balanced in the coming years. Owners of ten residential units and more have until September 30, 2023 to do so, while owners of six to nine residential units have until September 15, 2024 to do so. This is according to the directive issued by the Federal Ministry for...

When tenants move into a new apartment, they automatically receive electricity from a basic supplier - unless they choose an optional supplier. But what happens if a tenant has opted for a supplier of choice but the meter numbers of two neighboring apartments get mixed up? The Frankfurt am Main Local Court has now ruled on this. In the case in question, the...

He himself admits that it is an experiment, schoener-wohnen.de author Jan Kahl has dared it anyway. In a series of pictures, he shows what alternatives there are to the Christmas tree. For example, a wooden ladder can be decorated with Christmas decorations, fairy lights and fir greenery to provide a Christmas flair. In addition, flower arrangements in shades of green and berry,...

In North Rhine-Westphalia, private real estate buyers who have purchased a house, condominium or plot of land this year or still want to buy can benefit from relief of up to 10,000 euros on the real estate transfer tax. The prerequisites for this are, however, that they use the property themselves, that it has cost/cost no more than 500,000 euros and that it is registered with the NRW.Bank...