Housing Gap
House prices against rents, measured two ways: one holds borrowing costs fixed, the other lets them move.
Homes cost 30.0% more than their rents justify, meaning a buyer at today’s price gets unusually little rental income back each year. Compared with what it costs to own a home outright instead, they cost 10.9% more, and today’s high interest rates are part of that second gap. As of 2026-06-30.
What this measures
House prices in the US and Germany against rents, measured two ways. The usual measure compares price-to-rent with its own long-run average, which assumes borrowing costs never change. The second prices a year of owning (mortgage, property tax, upkeep and risk, net of expected appreciation) and asks what multiple of rent that justifies. Neither replaces the other.
How to read it
Above the line means expensive by that measure; where the two lines pull apart, interest rates are the reason. The cost-of-owning reading rests on an inflation-expectation assumption, so it is the less certain of the two, and its range is shown beside it. Germany stops at the two anchors, with no euro fair value, and the page says why.
Limits
Nobody publishes what people expect house prices or inflation to do, and both are inputs, so the range on the cost-of-owning reading is wide; that is the honest size of the uncertainty. Germany gets no price in euros because no free source publishes a current German household income at this frequency; it is marked as a refusal, not estimated. The rent series is published later than prices and can run a few quarters behind. It is shown at its own date, because carrying it forward would be inventing the missing quarters.
Has any of this meant anything?
Measured only against the history that existed at the time, neither comparison clears the bar, and what followed expensive readings differed only a little from what followed cheap ones. An earlier version of this page measured against the whole record, future included, which makes almost any slow-moving gauge look predictive. So both are shown as descriptions of where prices stand, not as forecasts.
Counted every way it can be counted
Then read on the two countries this page is about
What has usually followed
The assumptions, spelled out
Every source, with a link
Related reading: Germany's Housing Deficit: The Anatomy of a Supply Shock, a data briefing on the supply side of the German market this page's own gauge tracks from the price side.