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OVERSEAS
Move to Frankfurt for well-priced homes and culture
The ‘boring’ financial hub is friendly, and great for kids
Hugh Graham
October 8 2017, 12:01am,
The Sunday Times
High society: the city straddles the River Main
High society: the city straddles the River Main
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Frankfurt is boring and devoid of beauty — London bankers would sooner quit their jobs than relocate to the city. So say the sceptics after every headline predicting that thousands of jobs will move there from the City after Brexit: estimates range from 1,000 to 100,000.
When Nicholas Jefcoat, a British banker, took a job for two years in Frankfurt in 1992, his friends thought he was crazy. Yet, 25 years later, he is still there, and is evangelical about his adopted city. “The view from abroad is that there’s no culture here, that it’s a place without a soul, governed by money, but that’s entirely untrue,” he tells me over sashimi at Higematsu, an authentic Japanese restaurant full of Japanese diners, hidden down a back alley.
Misunderstood: Frankfurt has a burgeoning bar scene
Misunderstood: Frankfurt has a burgeoning bar scene
ATLANTIDE PHOTOTRAVEL/GETTY
Jefcoat, 62, lives in a three-bedroom Bauhaus home in Sachsenhausen, an elegant old-world neighbourhood within walking distance of town, across the River Main. Now a financial consultant who works from home, he can cycle to the financial district in 15 minutes. If he wants to hear some Wagner, he’ll pop into the opera house on a Sunday afternoon; his Austrian wife, Ulli, used to work in fundraising at the English Theatre, which is currently reviving Pygmalion.
On other Sundays, he’ll take a 45-minute drive to the riesling vineyards in the Rheingau, go trout-fishing an hour away in northern Bavaria, or play golf — 30 courses within 30 minutes, goes the refrain.
If he were younger, and single, he might sample the delights of the red-light district: not the brothels, but the burgeoning bar scene. “Bars are sprouting up,” he says. “Frankfurt can’t compete with London or New York for nightlife, but not everyone wants to be up at 3am and going into work at Goldmans at 6am. Where it wins is with families. It boxes way above its weight in terms of international schools, hospitals, transport, countryside. It’s safe. In terms of housing, you get a lot more. The cost of living is about two-thirds that of London.”
Jefcoat is the chair of the German British Society Rhein-Main, which has 200 members and holds events such as Shakespeare in the Park and lectures on Brexit. “Most Germans were horrified by the leave vote,” he says. “Some said, ‘Good riddance, the English are cherry-pickers wanting special treatment, or megalomaniacs who think they can re-create the British Empire.’ I was saddened, but I think it will help Frankfurt get as much business as possible. My English friends say my surname should be Turncoat.”
The vineyards of the Rheingau are a short drive away
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London bankers who make the move might be pleasantly surprised. It’s far prettier than its bleak reputation. In the city centre, skyscrapers are interspersed with gracious Wilhelmine architecture (built during the reign of Wilhelm II): mansard roofs, pastel stucco and wrought-iron balconies bursting with geraniums. Behind a glass office building, you might see a medieval tower or a storybook church.
Most of the half-timbered buildings on the old town square were re-created after the Second World War, but you’d have to be Pevsner to spot the difference. New skyscrapers such as the ECB tower have wonky angles and expressionist shapes. The riverbank, lined with museums and parks, is more bucolic than London’s concrete South Bank. And the 12,000-acre Frankfurt City Forest, the country’s largest urban woodland, offers German fairy-tale charm. (The city’s population is 700,000, the metropolitan region’s 5.7m.)
Even the brutalist grey postwar structures have retro cred now. “There are buildings that are so ugly, they’re nice,” says Javier Francisco Sayes Gomez, senior consultant at JLL Group in Frankfurt.
It’s a good metaphor for a city whose reputation for being boring could, perversely, make it cool. “Berlin has seen it all and done it all,” says James Ardinast, 45, a tattooed hipster restaurateur. “In Frankfurt, you can still be a pioneer.”
Ardinast is shaking up the red-light district, or Bahnhofsviertel. Round the corner from methadone clinics and brothels, you can drink cocktails and eat pastrami in his groovy restaurant-bars, Stanley Diamond and Maxie Eisen, named after Jewish-American gangsters. Sporting a wool hat in August, he tells me about edgy art galleries and pop-up happenings: DJs spinning in laundromats or at the bottom of empty swimming pools.
Hedonistic bankers could rent a flat here from about €800 (£710) a month, but Ardinast says the really edgy stuff is happening 20 minutes to the southeast, in Offenbach, where art students rent cheap flats and party at the famous Robert Johnson techno club.
Many of the buildings in the old town square were rebuilt after the warMany of the buildings in the old town square were rebuilt after the war
Bankers are more likely to be found in the leafy, sleepy Westend, a civilised oasis not far from the city centre. It’s a mix of fin de siècle villas, old-fashioned street lamps, psychotherapists’ offices and joggers in the Grüneburgpark. Family houses are hard to find, but a 1,500 sq ft flat with three bedrooms might cost €1.5m to buy or €2,900 a month to rent.
The latter is the norm here. Tim, a fiftysomething from Bristol who works in expat financial services, has been a tenant here for 13 years, and has never once had a rent rise. His landlord can’t evict him unless he moves in himself. “You won’t earn as much in Frankfurt,” he says. “Half of your money goes in taxes. But nobody comes to make money. You’re here for the lifestyle.”
That view is echoed by Isabel Scholes, 54, an expat who has lived in Frankfurt for 25 years and rents a large flat with two receptions in the Westend. “I probably spend 20% of my net salary on rent,” says Scholes, who is head of communications for a German law firm. “It’s a much easier life here. I live in the best area. I walk to work. My health insurance is great. You can go to the gym after work, then go for dinner. In London, it’s one or the other.
“London is a horror to me — people pay £5,000 a year to commute from Cambridge on a dirty train, and you don’t get a seat.”
She finds the German city open-minded and cosmopolitan (one in three Frankfurters is from abroad), and admires the way parents let young children roam free. She admits missing the sea and Marks & Spencer: “The supermarkets here are dreadful, though German bread is much better than English bread.”
Scholes also misses “English humour and self-deprecation”. “An ordinary British bloke can come here and get together with a really attractive German woman,” she says. “I have seen this a lot. Because he’s self-deprecating, German women think he’s Oscar Wilde and George Clooney rolled into one.”
When she visits London, she feels like “a hick from the sticks”. She loves the fact that Frankfurt is not “full-on hipster” — but you might see a few beards in Bornheim, northeast of town. Frankfurt’s equivalent of Hackney, it’s a sea of bars and cafes (Sugar, Chaplin), with the odd organic and vegan shop. You can rent a one-bedroom flat here for €800 a month, but be warned: some rentals come without appliances, so you may have to supply a fridge and cooker.
Bordering Bornheim to the west is fashionable Nordend, where there are pubs with chandeliers, bike-repair-cum-coffee shops and bankers in hoodies. On Friday evenings, everyone converges on Friedberger Platz, drinking beer al fresco and eating pulled beef in a bun from food trucks. (Avocado on toast has not yet hit Frankfurt; the native cuisine is more Deliciously Helga than Deliciously Ella.) One-bedders here start at €300,000.
Senior bankers and their families gravitate to the Taunus hills, a moneyed enclave 30 minutes to the north. This is Real Housewives of Frankfurt territory: coffee mornings, tennis leagues and book clubs amid Hansel and Gretel mansions and modernist piles with pools, in spa towns such as Bad Homberg, Königstein and Kronberg. Homes cost between €1.5m and €5m.
Some masters of the universe prefer to live in a skyscraper: the 48-storey Grand Tower, the tallest residential building in Germany, is due for completion in 2019. It has a funky curved facade and a range of flats, with prices from €585,000 to €3.96m.
There are more than 20 skyscrapers in planning, and they’re needed. Like London, Frankfurt has a housing shortage: the vacancy rate for rentals is 0.4%. Average prices have gone up by 10% in a year and 47% since 2012, and the city needs to build 5,000 homes a year to meet demand, according to Simon Marschall, a consultant at Ballwanz Immobilien estate agency. Frankfurt, too, has pressure on its green belt. And if London bankers descend en masse, it could get worse.
“The first wave will be next year. It could be up to 2,000 people,” Jefcoat predicts. “The second wave will come after Brexit, in March 2019. If the European Banking Authority moves from London to Frankfurt, which they are trying for, that will boost the numbers. If euro clearing comes here, that involves 100,000 jobs.
“Not all will come here, but locals still worry about what will happen to house prices, rents, schools and hospitals. The impact could be like Brexit in reverse.”
