In 2008 the state of North Rhine-Westphalia sold ~93,000 apartments for about 8,500€ each to Goldman Sachs. The reasoning was that the apartments were in bad shape and renovations would be expensive.

It's ridiculous how concerned politicians, especially conservatives, act now.

https://rp-online.de/nrw/panorama/leg-mieter-in-sorge_aid-11... (German)

> for about 8,500€ each to Goldman Sachs.

The article you linked mentions debt in height of 2.7 billion EUR. Means that the actual purchase price was about 3̶7̶5̶k̶ 37.5k per apartment.

If you factor that in, it's ~38,000€/apartment, you got an extra 0 mixed in somewhere. Those debts should've never existed in the first place. It's public housing, it should not make profits and rather break even.

Nowadays the investor makes huge profits despite the 60 year rental agreements the state negotiated for the renters and the required 12.50€/m² per year improvements. How was the state unable to break even? It's a mystery.

Oh right, my bad, it's been 38k per apt. I've edited the comment. Indeed that's very cheap. As for debt never existing, it's pretty common to leverage in the real estate world.

They got 3x what they expected and still it didn’t dawn on them that they were missing something. At first sight this goes off the stupidity chart into evil territory.

pretty sure you can expect most politicians to be evil.

if you understand german, Rezo [1] did an interesting video last month about similar corruption

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIj3qskDAZM