Your Rental Building Got Sold as Condos: Munich's 10-Year Eviction Protection (Umwandlungsschutz)

The Official Rule

A rental building being converted into individually owned condominiums doesn’t, by itself, put your tenancy at any particular risk. The real risk moment comes later, when your specific unit is actually sold to a new individual owner, since that’s what activates the possibility of a termination for Eigenbedarf or for what the law calls economic exploitation.

Under Section 577a BGB, a new owner generally can’t invoke either of those grounds until three years have passed since the sale. That’s the nationwide baseline. But the same statute lets state governments extend that period to as much as ten years in municipalities where the supply of affordable rental housing is officially recognized as particularly strained, and Bavaria has done exactly that for Munich.

Since January 2026, Bavaria’s Mieterschutzverordnung covers 285 municipalities with the extended 10-year protection, up from the previous 208. The expansion landed heavily around greater Munich and the Oberland region south of the city, and the same ordinance bundles two other protections already familiar from Munich’s rental market: the Mietpreisbremse capping new-lease rents and a reduced Kappungsgrenze on rent increases. The ordinance itself runs through the end of 2029, after which it can be renewed or revised again.

The clock itself is precise about what starts it. It isn’t the date the building’s conversion into separate condominium units was formally completed, and it isn’t the date a sale contract was signed. It’s the date the new individual owner is actually entered into the Grundbuch, Germany’s land register. A unit can sit converted and unsold for years, and nothing about your tenancy changes until an actual new owner is registered against your specific unit.

What Real People Say

A dispute that reached Munich’s own Landgericht München I, and then the Bundesgerichtshof, shows how far courts are willing to go to keep the ten-year clock intact once it starts. A single buyer purchased a rented building in Munich in 2021, converted it into individually owned units, and then, within about a year, transferred one unit into a family partnership he formed with his spouse and two adult children. The family partnership then issued a termination notice claiming a personal-use need for one of the daughters. The Amtsgericht initially granted the eviction, but the Landgericht München I reversed that decision, and on 21 January 2026 the Bundesgerichtshof (case VIII ZR 247/24) confirmed the reversal on further appeal. The family exemption the buyers tried to invoke, a separate provision under Section 577a that lets family-owned partnerships buy into a building without independently retriggering the block, was found not to apply to this fact pattern at all: a single individual first buys and starts the clock, and transferring the unit into a family arrangement afterward doesn’t restart it or offer a way out of it.

An earlier Munich case followed a similar arc from the other direction. A management company bought a Munich building in 2011 and converted it into condominiums a year later. A new individual owner then acquired one of the units and was registered in the land register in March 2017. When that owner attempted a personal-use termination in 2022, targeting a move-out date in March 2023, both the local and regional courts found the termination invalid, since the ten-year period, running from the March 2017 registration, wouldn’t actually expire until March 2027. The case was a reminder that the calculation is genuinely mechanical: count ten years from the registration date, and nothing shortens it.

Step by Step

1. Find out whether your building was originally rented as a whole and only later divided into individually owned condominium units, since this specific protection applies to conversions that happened after your tenancy started, not to units that were already condominium property when you moved in.
2. If you get notice that your unit has been sold, check the date the new owner was actually registered in the Grundbuch, not the date of the sale contract or any earlier announcement, since that registration date is what starts the ten-year clock.
3. If a termination notice for Eigenbedarf or economic exploitation arrives, calculate whether ten years have genuinely passed since that registration date before assuming the termination is valid.
4. Watch for restructuring moves, like a unit being transferred into a partnership or a family arrangement shortly after the original purchase, since courts have confirmed this doesn’t reset the clock or create an exemption.
5. If you believe a termination arrived before the protection period actually expired, respond in writing and consider consulting a Mieterverein or a tenancy lawyer, since the burden is on the new owner to show the blocking period has genuinely run its course.
6. Keep your own copy of the land register entry date if you can obtain it, since it’s the single fact this entire protection turns on.

Compliance Note

This page explains the general framework around Section 577a BGB and Bavaria’s extended Umwandlungsschutz as it applies in Munich in mid-2026. It is not legal advice, and whether this specific protection applies to your situation depends on your building’s conversion history, your move-in date, and the exact registration date of any new owner. Confirm your own circumstances with a Mieterverein or a lawyer specializing in tenancy law before assuming a particular termination is valid or invalid.