Advice on residential areas in south-east Munich

We want to buy a house in south-east Munich, but the more we look the more confused I'm getting. We're looking at one of the following areas: Trudering, Perlach, Haar, Ottobrunn, Neubiberg, Unterhaching.

I've read all the threads on the different districts as well as walk the streets and do plenty of research. But I still don't know how the areas compare against each other. Each place seems to have different advantages and disadvanges.

One big question that concerns me is which areas are likely to hold their value in the future. Buying a house will be the biggest financial decision of our lives, particularly given the prices in Munich!

For example, we've found a lovely house north of Gronsdorf Sbahn station, near the Messestadt Park. However everyone seems to say its an ok area but nothing special. I can't trust the Makler and I don't know if there are any big pitfalls there.

By the way, I realise this is a very subjective question based on one's lifestyle. Nevertheless any comments would be very appreciated at this stage, I'm slowly cracking up!

We live in Unterhaching and I really like it...we have a park right around th corner aswell as Perlacher Forrst which is nice to walk/bike in. There is also a nice outdoor pool for those hot summer days. You have like 10 supermarkets (ok a slight exaggeration) within a few minutes walk or drive, plenty of doctors, pharmacies, etc. And it takes less than 20 min to get to Marienplatz.

Thanks for your input Erdbeere. We're currently renting in Unterhaching, well on the northern part near Fasanenpark Sbahn station. I also love the area and am watching anything that comes up on the market with interest.

However, there are very few houses coming on the market from Unterhaching. The ones that do are either too far from the Sbahn for us, or they are heavily overlooked by lots of other houses. The building density seems to be much higher around Unterhaching Sbahn station. We're spoiled at the moment with a 5 minute walk to the Sbahn, but I'm reluctant to give that up. Maybe I have to compromise a bit more ...

By the way I realise there's lots of new houses being built in the area around Unterhaching. Unfortunately one of us (not mentioning any names!) is a bit fussy and wants a bigger garden than they tend to offer. So it will probably have to be an older house.

Hi Dreamer,

We bought our rowhouse here in Trudering in 1999 and really love it here. For a purely statistical comparison, you could check the city's statistical yearbook.
To order the book:
http://www.muenchen.de/Wirtschaft/Wirtscha...8570/index.html
To view it online:
http://www.mstatistik-muenchen.de/themen/s...enbuch_2007.pdf
This will give you info on schools, crime, etc. Trudering-Riem also has its own portal: www.trudering-riem.de and some of the other parts of town may too.

My gut feeling (for what it's worth) is that housing prices in Germany are rather stable. You won't make a big profit if you ecide to sell your home in a few years, but you won't have a big loss either. Of course, the future effects of the sub-prime mortgage mess are hard to judge.

Homes are an investment, but also something you want to enjoy while you live there. So my advice (my 2 cents worth) are to consider what is important to you. We spent 9 months looking before we settled on this home. Our daughter was 4 at the time, but we already considered her future needs. For example, we wanted a place with good MVV connections, so that when (as a teenager) she goes out drinking with friends, she won't be dependent on a car. One thing we didn't consider was the proximity of good schools of all kinds. (At age 4, it's hard to predict whether your kid will make the cut for gymnasium.) We wanted open space, and green areas nearby. We also wanted very little traffic, so that our daughter could play outside safely.

The things we couldn't have predicted back when we bought the house (as it was basically a bunch of brick walls back then), but which we really appreciate now are:
Good neighbors who share some of the same values (educationis important, littering is bad, etc.) and are fun to be with
A real multi-kulti mix of nationalities
A row of small shops nearby
A park (with playground and sledding hill) behind the house, where kids can run, jump, scream and be normal kids without someone flipping out
Three bus stops, giving us great flexibility is getting everywhere
A forest for lovely walks and cross-country skiing. Studies have shown that people who live near parks live healthier, because nice areas for a stroll encourage you to do that

So it might be good to think about what exactly you expect from your new home.

I wish you good luck - I'm sure you'll enjoy your home wherever it is!

Gronsdorf north of the S-Bahn station is a very nice place to live, upper middle class here, only single or double family homes as far as I've seen. I wouldn't call it ok, I would call it great. It's not big and S-Bahn is usually not more than a 5-minute walk away. However, for any kind of shopping or groceries you will have to drive (but again, that's not any different in most of the other areas you mentioned).
All the other areas you mentioned are also very nice areas to live (take away a couple of streets with high-rise blocks in Haar). In the end, it depends on your personal feel about where to live. Housing prices should be stable in all the communities you mentioned.

Thank you so much for your detailed and useful advice MunichMom and keysersoze! I'm very relieved now and calming down. We love that area north of Gronsdorf too, but my imagination is getting a bit carried away with all the possible things that could go wrong. I suppose I'm looking for the big catch or problem that only locals know. Sometimes you just need an independent person to say what they think.

We're not buying a house as a financial investment, we don't expect to make any money from it. It is more a personal lifestyle choice, albeit a very expensive one! I just don't want to feel we paid too much either.

It was great to read your views on what is important when considering a place MunichMom - some of those points we already considered, but others were hard for us to foresee for us at the moment.

Thanks very much, you've put my mind greatly at ease. Any more comments are of course appreciated.

Good advice from MunichMom - I would add two aspects to consider, one being the commute to work (for me being stuck in traffic in the evening is a major frustration) and being strict about how much time you want to invest in travelling to and from work. the other is perhaps a bit more subtle, but when you've found a house that interests you, its worth looking at the surrounding properties and whether the area has already been "redeveloped". The price of land being what it is, developers are always looking for ways to squeeze more profit out, and that often means knocking down older properties on a good size proprty, and replacing with a "mehrfamilienhaus" and tiny gardens. That's going on a lot in Trudering right now, but less I think in the towns outside Munich's city limit, as they still have development space.

Last tip, when you come to financing, Austrian banks will offer better conditions than german ones so don't rush to get locked in to long term fixed interest rates without looking across the border.