DIP partner Aengevelt Immobilien evaluates initial experience with the application of the construction turbo, which came into force on 30 October last year. The preliminary result: Many municipalities are still finding it difficult to apply the new instruments, which are intended to facilitate housing construction, because they find it (too) complicated and legally risky or because they still burden the already critical construction costs with political demands. In the meantime, there is also progress and the first reports of success.
The “Act to Accelerate Housing Construction and Secure Housing”, or “Bauturbo” for short, came into force on 30 October 2025 and is intended to help combat the housing shortage by making building permits much easier. These include, in particular, making it easier to deviate from existing development plans, facilitating additions and densification in unplanned inner areas, and simplifying the conversion of commercial or office space into apartments. In addition, residential construction in outdoor areas close to the town is also to be made possible if it is directly related to existing buildings. The agreement between residential construction and commercial use is to be facilitated and finally the entire approval procedure is to be accelerated, among other things by dispensing with the previously mandatory citizen participation.
Whether they apply the construction turbo is at the discretion of the municipalities. This has shown that it took numerous, especially smaller, municipalities several months to even deal with the new instruments and to make fundamental decisions on its application. It turns out that the construction turbo confronts countless municipalities with considerable challenges:
For example, the municipalities concerned have considerable concerns about whether and that legal risks will arise if the new regulations are applied. In addition, the possible waiver of citizen participation is often critically assessed because of fears of new conflicts and actions for annulment. The three-month period within which the municipalities review the application documents, coordinate with the building permit authority, involve the public if necessary, decide on the application of the construction turbo, involve the higher administrative authority, grant the municipal approval in accordance with § 36 BauGB and forward the project package is often perceived as too narrow. Since the application of the construction turbo requires extensive preparatory work (examining application potentials, clarifying responsibilities, passing policy decisions, developing model resolution templates, organizing documentation, etc.), many municipalities refer to their personnel capacity limits.
In order to solve the problem knot, the first six months after the construction turbo came into force were primarily used to organize online seminars, develop guidelines and manuals, set up an implementation laboratory, organize exchanges of experience and carry out extensive training measures. The fact that the ability of municipalities to apply the construction turbo is not a trivial task is also confirmed by the report of the workshop of the implementation laboratory of 10.11.2025, which lists dozens of preparatory measures and procedural steps on 54 slides that municipalities must carry out before they can make use of the new instruments.
With two judgments of the Higher Administrative Court of Baden-Württemberg (judgment of 6 November 2025; Az.: 5 S 695/24 and judgment of November 13, 2025; Ref. 5 S 259/25), there is also a first case law of the higher courts, which clarifies that approval decisions pursuant to § 31 (3), § 36a and § 246e BauGB require a clearly formulated and comprehensible planning model. The new possibilities in particular require municipalities to formulate their planning goals precisely and to make their approval decisions consistently. This increases the requirements for the documentation of urban planning guidelines, for the clear regulation of responsibilities (which usually require the participation of the council bodies) and for legally secure and robustly justified resolutions.
In the meantime, there are also initial positive experiences and results with the systematic application of the construction turbo. After eight months of preparation, the city of Paderborn approved the first application of the construction turbo for a project of a housing cooperative. And in the German financial center of Frankfurt am Main, the building administration has already reviewed 22 residential construction projects and applied construction turbo instruments to 40 percent of the projects. This also included the approval of a project that will create around 900 residential units alone. The Schleswig-Holstein state metropolis of Kiel decided differently to limit the construction turbo exclusively to projects with at least two residential units and to areas of 5,000 square metres or more, which excludes densification of single-family homes in the segment and on smaller plots. The city of Düsseldorf already decided in March of this year to apply the construction turbo, but requires that the builders meet the quota requirements for subsidized apartments and also contribute to the follow-up costs for the social infrastructure. With this additional design, however, even the construction turbo cannot solve the main problem of residential construction – the disproportion between construction costs and rental income.
Dr. Wulff Aengevelt, Managing Partner of DIP partner Aengevelt Immobilien: “The construction turbo should and can significantly simplify and accelerate the creation of new housing, especially in areas with a recognizably inadequate affordable housing stock and/or new housing supply, primarily in this demand segment. In practical implementation, the new law has opened up new responsibilities for them from the point of view of numerous municipalities or, if the approach is still restrained, has additionally imposed them on them. Depending on the willingness of the public sector and investors to adapt and apply, this results in disillusionment to the point of “it still doesn’t work that way”, depending on the willingness of the public sector and investors to adapt and apply, especially if the streamlined administrative management made possible by the construction turbo continues to be or will continue to be paired with ideological or bureaucratic overloads that increase construction costs: Construction turbo with excessively expensive construction costs misses the socially overdue turnaround in housing construction, because even the best packaging absolutely needs appropriate content in order to be successful”.
