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I met a woman in Berlin who lived only a few minutes from the Kurfustendamm, Berlin’s main shopping street. Her flat is about 80 square metres. Her rent is €350 euros (£235) a month and €100 of that goes on her heating and electricity. The flat’s market price would be about €100,000, so even a very cheap interest-only mortgage at 5% would cost her significantly more than her basic rent (at €416 a month). Add on €100 for heating and so on, and to buy the same kind of flat as she is renting would cost her an extra €166 a month. Why, she asked, would she want to do that when prices haven’t moved for 10 years? It’s a sentiment many of her countrymen share. Across Germany only 40% of people own the homes they live in and in Berlin a mere 13% do. There is an often-repeated view that Germans don’t own property for “cultural” reasons. I don’t buy it: my guess is they don’t own property because it hasn’t made any sense to do so. If they thought buying houses was a sure-fire way to get rich, they would buy houses.

The interesting thing here is that I am beginning to suspect that it might be a sure-fire way to get rich. Why? Because the cost balance between renting and buying is slowly shifting and that means demand is going to rise. The main reason rents are so low in much of Germany is because a large amount of the housing stock is government-owned, and the government likes rents to be low. In Berlin, I am told, the state doesn’t like to charge anyone more than €5 a square metre a month. The highest average rents in the country are charged in Munich, where you can expect to pay around €12 a square metre. That means that the most you can pay for a 100 square metre apartment is €1,200 euros a month, about the amount you’d pay per week in central London.

However, this tenant-friendly situation isn’t going to last much longer. The government cannot continue to subsidise housing because it is heavily in debt, so it has begun to sell off much of its housing assets to large private investors. These firms, mainly UK and US-based, have bought up $25 billion (£13 billion) of formerly state owned German property, and in March the mayor of Dresden sold his city’s entire stock — 48,000 apartments — to Fortress Investment, a US private-equity group, wiping out its entire public debt.

Fortress and the other new owners of Germany’s houses are unlikely to manage their new holdings in quite so charitable a way. The result? Rents are going to rise and that’s going to make owning look more attractive than it has for a long time.

The other part of the equation is the mortgage market. Even if you had wanted to buy a house in Berlin five years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to unless you’d had substantial savings: the banks made you put down huge deposits and then charged very high interest rates.

But that is now changing too. As a real single market in financial products spreads across Europe the German banks are having to offer a bit more: you can now get competitive interest rates and even 100% mortgages if that’s what you want, all things that bring down the cost of buying.

The big buyers of Berlin’s residential blocks make their returns not just from notching up rents, but by knocking on doors with a mortgage adviser by their side and asking their tenants if they want to buy them out. An increasing number of people are doing the sums and saying yes, which I think is probably the right answer: when buying is cheaper than renting, rational people buy.

Finally it is worth noting that the German economy is making a strong-looking recovery. After growing a pathetic 1.2% between early 2001 and 2005, the economy has suddenly woken up: in the third quarter GDP grew at an annualised rate of nearly 3%. The jobless figures have fallen by 500,000 in the past year to under 4m. Business confidence is at a 15-year high and even Germany’s consumers seem to have a bit of Christmas spirit going: consumer confidence is at a five-year high. All this also bodes well for the property market.

The bad news is that it isn’t easy for individual investors to buy in Germany. The market is still illiquid and quite opaque — it can be hard to know what real market prices are. Commissions, charges and taxes on transactions are high, so buying just one flat has long been just too difficult.