Purchase costs and equity

The interesting figure is not the sum of the costs, it is the cash. German lenders finance the property and not the cost of acquiring it: transfer tax, notary, land registry and the agent all come out of equity. A buyer with 60,000 euros saved, looking at a 300,000 euro flat, reads an 80 percent loan as comfortable and is roughly 47,000 short — before furniture has even been discussed. Transfer tax alone runs from 3.5 % in Bavaria to 6.5 % in North Rhine-Westphalia; on the same price that is a 9,000 euro difference decided by nothing but a state border. The rates here are stored and overridable, because states do change them and a table baked into a calculator goes stale quietly. And since 2020 the agent's commission is split between buyer and seller under §§ 656c and 656d BGB — your share is normally half, not the whole.