The study from the Institute of German Economics (IW), still unpublished but reported in the Saturday edition of the “Rheinische Post”, shows that retail rents in city centres rose 6 % last year in 16 selected cities, including Germany’s seven largest. This marks a sharp rebound after a period of almost flat growth in previous years. According to the report, the data indicate that inner‑city retail is recovering but increasingly clustering around the most central locations.
In 2025, compared with the previous year, overall city‑wide rent increases were particularly high in Munich (+10.2 %) and Düsseldorf (+9.5 %). When looking at city centres alone, the biggest gains appeared in Dortmund (+16.3 %), Bremen (+12.8 %) and Munich (+12.0 %). Across the entire 2018‑2025 period, average annual rent growth for both full city zones and downtown areas ranged between 2 % and 4 %.
Bremen emerged as the outlier with the strongest medium‑term growth at roughly 4.7 % per year for both whole city and city‑centre rents. Stuttgart, on the other hand, recorded the weakest development, with only 1.8 % per year for the entire city and a mere 0.4 % per year in the centre. Nevertheless, despite this modest pace, Stuttgart remains – after Munich – the second most expensive city‑centre spot when measured by median rents.
The analysis draws on commercial rental listings from Value AG’s real‑estate database, which includes structured data on listings, property characteristics, rental prices and geographical details. The period covered is 1 January 2018 to 31 December 2025, and the dataset contains about 268,000 retail rental offers across Germany.
In conclusion, the study finds that retail rents in city centres have recovered strongly and at many locations are outpacing consumer price inflation. It also highlights a clear concentration of inner‑city retail in especially attractive, high‑traffic locations.