After two years of crisis, some in the otherwise successful industry may be longing for a trend reversal, wishing for transaction numbers to finally pick up again and new price records. But Tobias Just, real estate economist at the University of Regensburg, destroys any hope with his outlook. “We have a negative yield curve and that means we tend to get stuck in a recession,” says the economist.
Negative yield curve? Sounds technical, but is highly relevant in practice. This is what we are talking about when interest rates continue to fall as the terms increase. In normal times, short-term interest rates are lower than long-term ones. If the ratio changes, the signs point to recession. The summary of Just’s assessment of how the crisis on the real estate market will continue: “We are not through.”