Olaf Grawert

It's the base for the strategy.

So they would buy a land, they pay the price for the building, they clear the land, which means they demolish the building, they build anew, so they add the construction costs, and they divide it by the square meters.

Essentially, this is what real estate speculation is about.

How much profit you can extract from an existing building and how much money you can make once the old building is gone and the new one is built.

It's a shockingly cold calculation that turns the profit of tomorrow into a wrecking ball today.

And it's based on a spreadsheet that only counts money.

And it never asks what a building holds and who lives there.

But value and price are actually not the same.

There is a difference.

So the question shouldn't only be, what is the value of a house?

But the question should also be, what is the price to your home?

What is the price of the memories and the stories?

So which price do we give to family bonds, to birthday celebrations, to also the fights with our partners and these moments of forgiveness?

And what price tag do we also put on community, on the neighborhoods that raise us, on the familiar faces in the hallway, on friendship, or on the larger scale, on the freedom of a next generation to live together?

And these are the hidden costs of demolition that no one speaks about.

The hidden costs that you will never find in a budget or in a spreadsheet.

All of it happening in an era of severe housing crisis, where we all agree, no?

Where millions are struggling to find an affordable home,

where young people cannot move out of their parents' apartments, where working people are struggling to keep a roof over their head, and where even the middle class cannot afford property any longer.

And beyond these struggles, homelessness is rising in almost every country.