Business podcast: “Is this a bubble?”: Is construction looking up again?

The crisis has fully arrived in the construction industry. Last year alone, 2,900 companies in the sector went bankrupt – a record number. These include prominent examples such as the Signa Group of real estate speculator René Benko, which started the Elbtower in Hamburg and now leaves it as an unfinished shell. But many small construction companies were also hit, meaning that the federal government’s construction targets for 2023 were missed by a long way. Instead of 400,000 new apartments, only 270,000 were built. But what happens next with the crisis?

However, a building contractor from the south of the Republic is not quite as pessimistic as one might assume. “That’s the hangover feeling after the party,” says Dagmar Fritz-Kramer, head of the Baufritz company in Bavaria. A lot of things have been overheated in the past few years: interest rates were low, subsidies were high. Now your industry has to pull itself together and, together with politicians, think about how new paths can be found. For example, through much simpler construction that no longer costs as much.

That’s what the new episode of Is that a bubble?, the business podcast from ZEIT and ZEIT ONLINE about money, power and justice. The entrepreneur Fritz-Kramer is interviewed by the two business editors Carla Neuhaus and Zacharias Zacharakis. Her colleague Jurik Caspar Iser also explains what the problem is in the industry. And as always, an animal has the last word in this podcast.