To those of us in the Anglo world, Germany can seem an odd place. Corduroy suits are in vogue and pretty news presenters look like they have quickly thrown on their boyfriend’s shirt after a night of passion.

It is also a place where property speculation is seemingly considered a deviant form of behaviour.

That was my first impression of Germany. Admittedly, just scratching the surface does not show what lies beneath.

In New Zealand, the key questions surrounding property development are: Where do you get the land? Who owned it previously? How was permission gained? What is the sale price?

Such questions don’t seem to be the norm in Germany except in predictable hot spots (such as inner-city Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Munich, Cologne, and to a lesser extent, Berlin). These are important questions because zoning processes give landowners within, or just outside of, zones the potential for windfall profits.

Permission or planning consent can be worth a lot of money in New Zealand. According to Motu Economic Research, the Auckland Metropolitan Urban Limit affects values by a factor of ten.

In Germany, this seems not to be the case. Property speculation is frowned upon and homeownership patterns are far different. The homeownership rate is between 40% to 48% and once people move into their first home, typically between the ages of 35 and 50, they tend not to move again. The first house is usually their home for life. There is no hurry to start climbing the property ladder, a shrinking population, and little excess demand.

However, there is still demand for good housing in ageing cities. Local authorities receive approximately €300 for an older person, and much more for a younger one, from the state government. A profits based grant is also ceded back to cities.

For example, the city of Essen (home to 550,000 people) receives as its share of business tax around €400 million in grants from the state government. Essen, which is home to companies such as steel giant Thyssen-Krupp, knows that – more business means more money and a way to pay the bills.

So, on the one hand, companies are important to the economic well-being of an area, and on the other hand, speculator property development and government lobbying is so socially unacceptable it doesn’t seem to occur much.

This pace is a conundrum. I have much left to learn about Germany.