Four apartments and 600 people: Linden's mini-houses caused a real storm

HAZ + Hannover 01.03.2021

Although the rent is considerable, municipal housing company Hanova has been run over with interest for their tiny house project. 600 people signed up as interested in the four houses planned for Linden. This may lead to follow-up projects.

Hannover. Even the biggest optimists at Hanova housing company were not ready for this: in just a few days, more than 600 people stated their interest in the four mini-apartments to be installed in the courtyard of the Roesebeckstrasse in Linden. And this despite the rent of €17.50/m2, excluding utilities, which is unusually high for Hanover.

Tiny houses in Hanover: huge demand

"The rental price of a square meter of an ordinary rental apartment cannot be compared to the rental price of these houses," says Karsten Klaus, CEO of Hanova. After all, these are not ordinary apartments, but rather a "single house in the garden". All apartments have an outdoor terrace and a detailed room solution inside, which fits everything that you would be accustomed to in a larger apartment, on 28 sq metres. "A furnished kitchen, bathroom equipment - these are unavoidable costs that make any project expensive, regardless of whether you install the kitchen and the bathroom in a 60- or 28-square-meter apartment," says Klaus.

The company is "absolutely thrilled" by the high demand, says Klaus. Hanova sees the project as a pilot: "We wanted to see if there was any interest in such a model - and we see that this is clearly the case."

Tiny houses, ie finely furnished apartments with significantly smaller living space, are successful all over the world. This type of building is also planned for the Kronsberg ecovillage, where construction will start this summer.

Hanova wants to continue building cheaply

Will Hanova only build such tiny houses in the future? No, Klaus categorically says: “Given our 15,000 apartments, these four apartments are definitely a niche project. As a municipal housing company, we continue to stand for cheap housing.” However, multi-storey or larger buildings could not have been built in the courtyard of Roesebeckstrasse, so it made sense to try something else there.

Further reading:

"Hannover: this is life in a small house"

"Ecovillage Hannover: The tiny-house village on Kronsberg is taking shape"

Tiny houses are "no alternative to a multi-storey building, if we want to remedy the housing shortage," says Klaus. But in principle the company is open to building something similar to the Roesebeckstrasse project elsewhere, in the near future. "If we have a location where tiny houses can be used for densification, then we will certainly consider that again," promises Klaus.

The Linden-Süd apartments, which should be ready for use by the summer, come from the Estonian architecture, design and dwelling development company Kodasema. Hanova buys them as a finished product and rents them out. "The project is not cheap," says Klaus about the price per square meter. "It's not like we profit a lot from the rent."

By Conrad von Meding