In Germany, many tenants are afraid of winter and above all of the additional costs that will follow. According to expert opinion, it will be steep. In Sweden, on the other hand, tenants can go into the winter relaxed. The reason is the warm rent model.
Tenants in Germany do not have much influence on their additional costs. You have to pay what the landlord asks, regardless of whether they choose the cheapest gas supplier or not. And if the ancillary costs paid are not enough, there is an additional claim and the tenant must also pay for it. As a landlord, you are off the hook in this situation. You don’t have to budget particularly cheaply, nor is there an incentive to repair a building with as little consumption as possible. If you do it anyway, you can pass on eight percent of these costs to the tenant.
It’s different in Sweden. In 2000, the government introduced the “rent including heating model” here. This means that apartments are not rented with cold rent and variable additional costs, as we do, but with a flat-rate rent including heating. The highlight: while the landlord promises a fixed rent including heating, the tenant guarantees a certain room temperature in the apartment. This is automatically logged during the heating period. Tenants who heat more than agreed then have to pay extra. Those who heat less, on the other hand, get money back.
For tenants, this means an incentive to heat as economically as possible.
But there are also incentives for landlords: if you renovate your property in such a way that less energy is required to maintain the desired temperature, the price for the room temperature remains the same. So you can keep the savings from the renovation.
In Sweden, the introduction of the warm rent model has also made great progress in climate protection: since then, emissions from Swedish households have fallen by 95 percent.
In Germany, at least the incentive to renovate has recently been regulated with the so-called step model for the CO2 price. The worse the energy condition of a building, the higher the landlord’s share of the CO2 price. If landlords invest in climate-friendly heating systems and energetic refurbishments, their share of the CO2 costs decreases further. Tenants, on the other hand, can reduce their costs with economical heating – but the fear of utility bills remains.
