Germany has the projects. It just can't build them.

Between the end of 2023 and the end of 2026, residential projects totalling 30.1 million square metres of living space were scheduled for completion across Germany. Around 9.4 million square metres — equivalent to roughly 125,000 homes — will not be delivered. Felix Embacher, managing director of researchers Bulwiengesa, summed it up simply at a recent Development Monitor briefing: "We could have built Rostock. The projects existed, the developers existed. It just wasn't implemented."

That gap between planning and reality is the central finding of Bulwiengesa's Development Monitor for the first half of 2026. The overall pipeline — tracking just under 22,000 projects with a combined floor area of approximately 174 million square metres — has contracted by 2.7% since the end of 2025. Construction starts in Q2 2026 are running 65% below their peak, while residential construction starts remain 67% below their Q2 2022 high. Residential project volume has edged up by 2.9% to around 68 million square metres, but nearly half remains at the detailed planning stage and only around 15.5 million square metres is currently under construction. Residential dominates the discussion because of its political importance, but the pattern extends well beyond housing. Office project volume has fallen by 5.7%, logistics by 7.7% and senior housing by 8.4%, with only niche sectors such as data centres continuing to expand. A paper pipeline that does not convert into construction is not a recovery signal. It is a backlog.