Every Berlin apartment has its own cellar storage room, right? Well, not quite.
From our experiences it does happen from time to time that we sell an apartment doesn’t have a cellar storage space for the exclusive use of the apartment. It is not always stated in the land registry that the apartment comes together with a storage room with a designated room number. Sometime the spaces in the cellar are just allocated by the house administration. And sometimes there aren’t enough to go around!
What should you do if you are selling an apartment without one? Does this affect the price of the apartment? The short answer is: it depends who’s selling it.
For a recent sale of ours the situation was even more complicated because there was no cellar storage for the apartment at the time of the sale, however there were plans for changes to the cellar in the coming months in order to ensure that each apartment had its own storage room. But there was no guarantee that it would all work out.
Of course the seller expected to provide no selling price reduction because, in his view, it was highly likely that the apartment would soon have a cellar. The buyer of course took the opposite view: that there was currently no cellar and it was not sure that there would be one; therefore a price reduction was appropriate.
After much toing and froing regarding the situation we finally managed to put a value in euros to the cellar storage and got agreement from both sides about including a clause in the purchase contract regarding this issue. The buyer would hold back a certain part of the purchase price until a cellar storage room was allocated (within a certain timeframe). It all worked out in the end: the seller got the full selling price and the buyer ended up with an apartment with a cellar storage space.
Would we do it this way again? Probably not. In hindsight it was difficult to formulate the wording in the contract to reflect the exact way in which the cellar would be allocated in the future. Only the house administration could really say this and even they were not in a position to know this at the time of the sale. This left it open to interpretation by both parties with regards whether the conditions in the contract had been met and therefore whether the extra money for the cellar was now due, even though there was a physical handover that had taken place.