A bottom-up, fully-sourced estimate of professionally-managed (third-party-administered) dwellings in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, plus a separate lower-confidence commercial layer.
Answer: ~15 million professionally-managed residential dwellings (central case), in a defensible range of ~11M to ~19M, on a hard ~11.4M floor that needs no assumptions at all.
Everything here is built from public statistics: Zensus 2022 / Destatis, GdW/vdw, Statistik Austria and the GBV Verbandsstatistik, and the Swiss BFS. Every figure carries its source URL. Every assumption is stated as an assumption.
I built this because I needed the number for my own work and could not find an honest version of it. The figure most often repeated in this market is ~20M. When I sourced it properly, the number came out lower, so this is the lower number, with the workings. The uncertainty section at the bottom says plainly which single assumption drives most of the error, and it is not a small one.
Corrections and better sources are welcome. Open an issue.
Compiled 2026-07-10, commercial layer added 2026-07-11. Richard Dolmetsch. Licensed CC BY 4.0. Cite it, fork it, correct it.
Residential is the census-anchored core. Commercial was added as a separate, lower-confidence modeled layer, see "Commercial Hauptobjekte" below.
Bottom line: ~15 million professionally-managed residential dwellings in DACH (central case), in a defensible range of ~11M (low) to ~19M (high). The ~20M figure commonly cited in this market sits at or above the top of the independently-sourced range, not at the centre.
Commercial adds a separate, lower-confidence ~1.5M (range ~1.0–2.5M), see the Commercial Hauptobjekte section below. It is modeled, not census-grade, and materially larger by value than by unit count. Residential + commercial → ~16.5M DACH Hauptobjekte central (range ~12–21M).
Every unit below counts dwellings (Wohnungen): apartments and (where noted) commercial Lokale. Dwellings are already the primary lettable unit, so they map to residential Hauptobjekte. Parking bays and storage (Nebenobjekte) are not in any dwelling count. Where a source lets us see the split, it confirms this: Austria's GBV reports 1,006,700 Wohnungen separately from 483,030 Garagen. We count the former, drop the latter.
"Professionally managed" here = administered by a professional management operation (Hausverwaltung, Bewirtschafter, Wohnungsunternehmen, Genossenschaft, municipal housing company), whether the manager owns the asset or runs it for a third party. It excludes the private owner who self-administers a handful of units. That exclusion is the whole exercise; total dwellings (52.9M across DACH) is the easy number and the wrong one.
| Country | Total dwellings | Rental dwellings | Professionally managed (central) | Prof.-managed range | Confidence | Key sources (year) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | ~43.1M (dwellings) | ~23–25M (rental dwellings) | ~12M | ~9.1–15M | Med (floor High; private-outsourcing share Low) | Zensus 2022 / Destatis; GdW/vdw Wohnungswirtschaftliche Daten u. Trends 2024/25; Haus & Grund Wohnen in Zahlen 2025/26; IW Köln 2025 |
| Austria | ~4.91M (dwellings, GWZ 2021) | ~1.77M (main-residence rental, 2023) | ~1.3M | ~1.0–1.6M | Med-High (GBV floor is hard-sourced) | Statistik Austria GWZ 2021 & Wohnen 2023; GBV Verbandsstatistik 2024 (data 2023) |
| Switzerland | ~4.84M (dwellings, 2024) | ~2.4M (rental dwellings) | ~1.7M | ~1.3–1.9M | Med-High (managed share of rental is high & well-attested) | BFS Gebäude- u. Wohnungsstatistik 2024; BFS Mieter/Eigentümer & Mietwohnungen (2019–2024) |
| DACH total | ~52.9M | ~27M | ~15M | ~11–19M | — | — |
| Case | Germany | Austria | Switzerland | DACH total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Low | ~9.1M | ~1.0M | ~1.3M | ~11.4M |
| Central | ~12M | ~1.3M | ~1.7M | ~15M |
| High | ~15M | ~1.6M | ~1.9M | ~18.5M |
Headline: ~15M central, ~11–19M range. (A parallel automated research pass put the central band slightly wider at ~13–18M and a broad-case high at ~24M. The difference is entirely whether condominium/WEG building administration is counted; see the uncertainty note.)
- Total dwellings ~43.1M (Zensus 2022, reference date 15.05.2022; ≈ stock update 31.12.2021 of 43.08M). Source: Statistisches Bundesamt, Zensus 2022 — https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Zensus2022/_inhalt.html ; vacancy PM (4.3% leer, confirms ~1.9M vacant of ~43M) — https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/Zensus2022-Pressemitteilungen/PM_zenus2022_46.html
- Rental dwellings ~23M (Zensus 2022: "rund 23 Millionen Wohnungen von verschiedenen Eigentümertypen vermietet"; some derivations put it at ~25.0M when a wider rental definition is used). This counts rental dwellings.
- Ownership of the rental stock (Zensus 2022, via Haus & Grund Wohnen in Zahlen 2025/2026):
- Privatpersonen (private small landlords): 63.5% (~14.6M) — https://www.hausundgrund.de/sites/default/files/downloads/250320hausgrundbroschuerewohneninzahlenweb.pdf
- Privatwirtschaft (private commercial housing companies): 14.33% (~3.3M)
- Genossenschaften (cooperatives): 11.66% (~2.7M)
- Kommune/Bund/Land (municipal/state/federal): 9.03% (~2.1M)
- Organisation ohne Erwerbszweck (non-profit): 1.49% (~0.34M)
- Hard floor — a directly-cited management figure, not an ownership residual: 9.1M dwellings. GdW/vdw (Wohnungswirtschaftliche Daten und Trends 2024/25): "Professionell-gewerbliche Anbieter bewirtschaften in Deutschland 9,1 Mio. Wohnungen … 36 % des Mietwohnungsbestandes." i.e. housing companies, cooperatives, municipal and listed providers actively manage 9.1M dwellings = 36% of the rental stock. Source: https://www.vdwbayern.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Wohnungswirtschaftliche-Daten-und-Trends-20242025.pdf — This is the strongest single German number: it says bewirtschaften (manage), not just own. Cross-checks: the ~36.5% professional/institutional ownership residual from the Vermietergruppen split ≈ ~8.4M (consistent); GdW's own member companies alone manage 6.0M ≈ 30% of rental (https://www.gdw.de/die-wohnungswirtschaft/), sitting inside the 9.1M.
- The swing above the floor: how much of the 16.1M privately-owned rental stock (IW Köln 2025, Private Vermieter in Deutschland; 5.2M private landlords, avg ~3 units each) is run by a third-party Hausverwaltung rather than self-managed — https://www.iwkoeln.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Studien/Gutachten/PDF/2025/Gutachten-Private-Vermieter-in-Deutschland.pdf German small landlords predominantly self-manage (the IW study frames many as not professionally organised), but ~40% of their units are condos inside a WEG (professionally administered building), and a minority outsource letting. Assumed third-party-managed share 15–35% → +2.4–5.6M, net of overlap. (These privately-owned units are not inside the 9.1M, so adding them does not double-count.)
- Context on the management industry: Destatis counted 24,066 property-management firms (2018;
30,000 by 2023) with €11B+ turnover — https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2019/09/PD19_370_31.html . Germany also has ~9.3M condominium dwellings in WEG, most with a professional Verwalter, an adjacent pool (building administration, not letting) that overlaps both owner-occupied and rented stock and is deliberately not added in. A parallel research pass tried to map that ~9.28M WEG bucket to "always professionally administered" and it was adversarially refuted (0–3 vote) on buildings-vs-units and self-management grounds, which is exactly why counting WEG would inflate the total toward/past 20M on a double-count, and why the high case here stops at ~15M for Germany.
- Germany professionally-managed rental dwellings: Low ~9.1M · Central ~12M · High ~15M.
- Total dwellings ~4.91M (Gebäude- u. Wohnungszählung, register census 31.10.2021, published Sept 2023); ~4.02M are main-residence dwellings. Source: Statistik Austria — https://www.statistik.at/statistiken/bevoelkerung-und-soziales/wohnen/wohnungsbestand ; GWZ 2021 — https://www.statistik.at/fileadmin/announcement/2023/09/20230919GWZ2021.pdf
- Main-residence rental dwellings ~1.77M (2023). Source: Statistik Austria, Wohnen 2023 — https://www.statistik.at/fileadmin/user_upload/Wohnen-2023_Web-barrierefrei.pdf
- GBV (gemeinnützige Bauvereinigungen) managed = hard floor. At end-2023 the 182 GBVs managed
1,520,600 units, of which 1,006,700 Wohnungen (dwellings) + 15,070 Lokale (commercial)
- 483,030 Garagen (parking, excluded as Nebenobjekte) + 15,780 other. Source: GBV Verbandsstatistik 2024 (data year 2023) — https://cms.gbv.at/DE/repos/files/GBV/Intranet_downloads/PDF/Verbandsstatistik/GBV%20Verbandsstatistik24.pdf (secondary: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinn%C3%BCtzige_Bauvereinigungen_in_%C3%96sterreich ) — This ~1.0M dwelling figure is the single cleanest "professionally-managed Hauptobjekte" number in all of DACH, because GBV itself already reports a Verwaltungsbestand (units under management) and splits Wohnungen from Garagen. The prior-year figure (GBV Verbandsstatistik 2023, Stand 31.12.2022) is the same shape: 1,492,500 units → 997,590 Wohnungen + 14,660 Lokale (= 1,012,250 Hauptobjekte) vs 464,910 Garagen + 15,300 sonstige (Nebenobjekte, excluded). https://cms.gbv.at/DE/repos/files/GBV/Intranet_downloads/Intranet_data/Statistik/STAT23%20Publikation.pdf
- Composition of the GBV-managed dwellings (end-2022): ~66% the GBV's own rental/cooperative stock, ~30% Eigentumswohnungen / WEG condominium administration, ~4% rental owned by others but managed by a GBV (pure third-party). So even on the strictest "third-party only" reading, ~34% of the ~1.0M is external administration; the rest is a non-profit professionally managing its own stock (still in scope per the definition above, which includes cooperatives).
- Above the GBV floor: municipal housing, ~276,100 Gemeindewohnungen (16% of Austrian rental; Wiener Wohnen dominates with ~202,500 in Vienna), plus private rental via commercial Hausverwaltungen. GBV (40% of rental, ~681,800) + municipal (~276,100) ≈ 958,000 institutionally managed rental dwellings as a social-housing floor. Sources: GBV market analysis + Statistik Austria Wohnen 2023.
- Austria professionally-managed dwellings: Low ~1.0M (GBV Verwaltungsbestand) · Central ~1.3M · High ~1.6M.
- Total dwellings 4.84M (BFS Gebäude- und Wohnungsstatistik 2024) — https://www.bfs.admin.ch/news/de/2025-0428
- Rental dwellings ~2.4M. BFS (end-2024): 2.5M households rent vs 1.4M own; tenure split ~58% rental / 36% owner-occupied / ~3% cooperative of households. Source: BFS Mieter/Eigentümer — https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bau-wohnungswesen/wohnungen/wohnverhaeltnisse/mieter-eigentuemer.html
- Ownership of rental (BFS 2019–2021): private persons 47%, institutional investors (insurance/pension funds/real-estate funds) ~33%, other corporations/cooperatives/public ~20%. BFS explicitly notes that many privately-owned rentals are run by a professional Bewirtschafter: tenants often don't know the owner is a private person because they only ever deal with the manager. Sources: BFS Mietwohnungen; SRF — https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/bfs-wohnungsstatistik-ein-drittel-der-wohnungen-gehoert-institutionellen-anlegern ; https://www.watson.ch/schweiz/wirtschaft/297119550-die-haelfte-der-schweizer-mietwohnung-gehoert-einer-privatperson
- Managed share of rental is high: institutional (33%) + other corporate/coop/public (~20%) = ~53% that is essentially always professionally managed, plus a large slice of the private 47% via Bewirtschafter → ~70–80% of rental. On ~2.4M rental that is ~1.7–1.9M. Independent corroboration of the high delegation level: the BWO/pom+ study Die volkswirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Immobilienwirtschaft der Schweiz reports an Outsourcinggrad of ~70% of the Bewirtschaftung market (revised to ~74% in later editions), but note this is measured by CHF value across the whole building stock (2014), not a residential-dwelling count, so it corroborates the direction rather than pinning the number. https://www.bwo.admin.ch/dam/bwo/de/dokumente/01_Wohnungsmarkt/15_Studien_und_Publikationen/Forschungsberichte/die_volkswirtschaftlichebedeutungderimmobilienwirtschaftderschwe.pdf.download.pdf/die_volkswirtschaftlichebedeutungderimmobilienwirtschaftderschwe.pdf
- Switzerland professionally-managed rental dwellings: Low ~1.3M (~55%) · Central ~1.7M (~70%) · High ~1.9M (~80%). (Switzerland is the thinnest-sourced leg. No source gives a CH professionally-managed dwelling count; a broad reading that most of the ~2.4M rental is managed would push the high toward ~2.0M+.)
- Sanity check ✓ SVIT Online-Wohnungsindex: ~393,900 rental objects advertised Apr 2025–Mar 2026. Against a rental stock of ~2.4M that is a ~16% annual listing rate, consistent with normal Swiss re-letting churn. The Swiss stock figure here is not wildly off this benchmark.
Everything above is residential. Commercial lettable units (offices, shops, gastronomy, practices, light-industrial/logistics) are a genuinely different measurement problem, and the number below is modeled, not census-grade. Treat it as order-of-magnitude, confidence LOW.
Why it can't be counted like dwellings: no statistical office counts "lettable commercial units." Commercial real estate is measured in floor area (m²) or assets-under-management (€), and the nearest unit-like proxy, business establishments (Arbeitsstätten), over-counts (home offices, no premises) and mixes owner-occupied with let. So a Hauptobjekt count must be triangulated, with visible assumptions, from two directions:
Method A — floor area ÷ average unit size. Germany's office stock alone is 382.4M m² across 323,700 office/administrative buildings (Destatis/BBSR Nichtwohngebäudebestand, 2015 — https://de.statista.com/themen/2537/bueroflaechen/ ; office split by city: 19 markets = 114.5M m² ≈ a third of the national total). Add retail Verkaufsfläche (~120M m², HDE, widely cited) and light-industrial/logistics. Of that, the let + professionally-managed slice (excluding owner-occupied corporate/SME premises) is roughly ~350–500M m²; at an average commercial unit of ~350–450 m² that is ~0.9–1.3M units in Germany.
Method B — establishments × let-share × managed-share. Germany had 3.8M business establishments (Niederlassungen, Destatis Unternehmensregister 2024 — https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Unternehmen/Unternehmensregister/_inhalt.html ). Assume ~45–55% are let rather than owner-occupied, and ~50–65% of those are managed by a third-party Hausverwaltung/PM → ~0.9–1.3M units. The two methods converge, which is the only reason I'd put a number here at all.
| Country | Establishments (proxy) | Prof.-managed let commercial units (central) | Range | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | ~3.8M (Niederlassungen, 2024) | ~1.1M | 0.7–1.8M | office 382M m² hard-sourced; let/managed shares assumed |
| Austria | ~700k companies / ~0.78M Arbeitsstätten (2021) | ~0.2M | 0.13–0.30M | Statistik Austria Arbeitsstättenzählung 2021 |
| Switzerland | ~637k companies / ~0.7M Arbeitsstätten (2022) | ~0.25M | 0.15–0.35M | BFS STATENT 2022; high CH management penetration |
| DACH commercial | — | ~1.5M | ~1.0–2.5M | modeled, confidence LOW |
- Sources for the establishment anchors: Statistik Austria Arbeitsstättenzählung 2021 (~700k companies) https://www.statistik.at/fileadmin/announcement/2023/08/20230814Arbeitsstaettenzaehlung2021.pdf ; BFS STATENT 2022 (~637k companies, ~5.6M employees) https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/industrie-dienstleistungen/erhebungen/statent.html
- No double-count with residential. The residential ~15M counts dwellings only. I explicitly dropped the commercial Lokale that sit inside residential portfolios (e.g. GBV's 14,660 Lokale were not added to its 1.0M Wohnungen). So this commercial layer is additive, not overlapping.
- The count understates commercial's economic weight. A commercial unit carries roughly 3–10× the rent and management fee of a dwelling, so on any per-unit revenue measure commercial is a much larger share than of the unit count, plausibly ~20–40% despite being ~10% of units. On a unit-count basis it is a ~1.5M footnote; on a revenue basis it deserves its own line.
DACH grand total (residential + commercial): ~16.5M professionally-managed Hauptobjekte (central), range ~12–21M, of which commercial is ~1.5M (~10% by count, materially more by value). The commercial layer is LOW confidence and should be presented as a modeled adjacency, never with the same weight as the census-anchored residential figure.
- Commercial is the lowest-confidence part of this whole file. The ~1.5M commercial figure is a model built on assumed let-shares and managed-shares and an assumed average unit size. There is no commercial equivalent of the Zensus. Its true range could plausibly be ~1.0–2.5M, and the biggest open questions are the owner-occupied-vs-let split of DACH commercial stock and the average lettable commercial unit size (both unmeasured here). Do not present commercial with the confidence of the residential figure.
- Germany's private-landlord outsourcing share is the dominant source of error. It alone moves the German number from ~8.4M to ~15M, i.e. it swings the whole DACH total by ~±5M. No single study cleanly reports "share of privately-owned rental dwellings run by a third-party Hausverwaltung." The 8.4M floor (professional/institutional owners) is hard-sourced; everything above it is an assumption about the 16.1M private stock. If you cite one German figure, cite the floor with the caveat, not the central.
- "Managed" vs "owned by a professional." This counts in-house management by housing companies and cooperatives as professional management, since they are professional operations running the same workflows. A purist "third-party Bewirtschafter only" definition would trim Germany and Austria (removing coops/municipal in-house stock) but not Switzerland much.
- WEG / condominium administration is deliberately excluded. ~10M German condos (>1.5M WEG) and large Austrian/Swiss Stockwerkeigentum pools have a professional Verwalter for the building, not the letting. Including WEG administration as "managed units" would push DACH well above 20M, but it is a different (adjacent) market from rental operations and would double-count against the rental figures.
- Rental-base definition wobble in Germany (~23M vs ~25M depending on whether vacant/edge cases are included) moves the professional-owner floor by ~0.5M. Minor next to point 1.
- Commercial Hauptobjekte are only partially in scope. These counts are residential dwellings plus the handful of commercial Lokale that appear inside residential-management statistics (e.g. GBV's 15,070). A full commercial-Hauptobjekt census would add to the total but is outside this residential-focused brief.
One-line takeaway: the honest, sourced answer is ~15M professionally-managed residential Hauptobjekte in DACH (range ~11–19M), with a rock-solid ~11.4M floor (Germany's 9.1M actively managed by professional-commercial providers + Austria's ~1.0M GBV Verwaltungsbestand + Switzerland's ~1.3M institutional/cooperative) that needs no heroic assumptions. The ~20M figure is reachable only at the top of the range and only by counting generous private-landlord outsourcing and/or WEG condominium administration, and the latter was adversarially refuted as a clean addition.
The primary pass was a manual bottom-up build from national statistical sources, country by country.
It was then independently cross-checked by an automated deep-research pass (2026-07-10): 20 sources fetched, 25 claims adversarially verified, 22 confirmed and 3 refuted. That pass reproduced every primary figure used above against Zensus 2022, GdW/vdw, Statistik Austria + GBV, and BFS, with none refuted. Its own assembled central band was slightly wider (~13–18M, broad-case high ~24M). The gap is entirely its more generous treatment of WEG/condominium building administration, which its own verification then flagged as a double-count risk (the WEG → "always managed" mapping was refuted 0–3).
Net: two independent methods agree on the ~11M floor and a mid-teens central. They differ only on how much adjacent condo-administration to fold in, which this file excludes on purpose.
This work is licensed CC BY 4.0 (see LICENSE). Share it, adapt it, use it commercially, just
give credit. CITATION.cff has a machine-readable citation, or use:
Dolmetsch, R. (2026). Professionally-managed dwellings in DACH: a sourced bottom-up estimate. https://github.com/richdolm/dach-managed-units
The underlying statistics belong to their respective publishers: Statistisches Bundesamt, GdW/vdw, Haus & Grund, IW Köln, Statistik Austria, GBV, Bundesamt für Statistik, BWO and SVIT. What is licensed here is the compilation, the derivation and the commentary, not the source data.