Dsseldorf (Reuters) – After the industry leader Vonovia, the second largest German real estate group LEG Immobilien is also preparing tenants for lower heating temperatures.
“I think that in the current war situation, it must be made clear to the population in Germany that renunciation is now the order of the day,” the manager told the “Handelsblatt”: “And that will be a renunciation of heat, that has to be expressed politically.” Lackum called for a legal option to be allowed to drop temperatures more sharply than before. Vonovia had already announced at the beginning of the month that it wanted to save gas and reduce the heating output in many of its apartments at night.
“We need a legal way for winter to be able to lower temperatures more than before,” Lackum told the newspaper. “We don’t benefit if we’re all warm privately but nobody goes to work anymore because the companies are shutting down production in droves,” he added. “If we don’t make tough decisions, we’ll run into big problems in the winter,” he underscored. The LEG boss also called for a moratorium on termination for tenants who can no longer pay the high heating bills. He expects “that up to 20 percent of tenants nationwide can no longer get the problem with energy prices under control financially alone”. The German Tenants’ Association had called for protection against evictions for tenants who can no longer pay their heating bills.
“In order to save as much gas as possible in our portfolios, we will successively introduce a night-time reduction in the heating temperature for the gas central heating systems in our portfolios,” Vonovia had announced. Vonovia reduces the heating output between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. to 17 degrees Celsius. Tenants can continue heating as usual during the day and in the evenings. 55 percent of the heaters in Vonvia’s portfolio are supplied with gas. Vonovia boss Rolf Buch had also warned against significantly increasing utility bills in view of the rapidly increasing energy costs in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions from the West.
(Report by Matthias Inverardi, edited by Ralf Banser. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at [email protected] (for politics and economics) or [email protected] (for companies and markets).)
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