But could things be about to change — especially if today’s general election brings a new government, with Angela Merkel, the conservative opposition leader, ousting Chancellor Gerhard Schröder?

A number of British investors seem to think so, and while other fly-to-let devotees have been piling into the “tiger economies” of eastern Europe, they have been discreetly snapping up undervalued property in Berlin instead.

After years of steady falls, prices in some parts of the city are as low as £500 a square metre — probably the lowest of any western European capital and appreciably less than the equivalent in Prague or Warsaw. Add in low borrowing costs and a long- entrenched renting culture among the locals, a mere 12% of whom are owner-occupiers, and it is clear that Berlin has far more to offer than beer and bratwurst.

“Prices in eastern Europe are largely based on expectations,” says Norbert Klink, a former banker who worked for several years in London before returning to set up a property company in his native city last year. “Berlin’s different,” he claims. “Even if everything stays as it is now, you will get a good return on your investment.”

Klink’s company, Norenva, specialises in selling not just flats but whole apartment blocks. Daunting? Not necessarily. You could pick up a small block for as little as £400,000 — and with German banks prepared to put up 80-90%, the amount of capital required is not as great as you may think. The immediate attraction is the yields.

Typically, you will take on a block already fully tenanted, giving a return of 7-10% — compared with mortgage rates of as little as 3-4%.

Chris Lockley, 39, a pilot from the West Midlands, is one of the growing band of would-be Berliners. This spring he bought a block of 12 flats in Wedding, in the former west, for a mere £216,000 — which pays him an impressive £25,700 a year. “With yields like that, it’s like somebody’s giving you money,” said Lockley, who is planning to add another 16-flat block to his portfolio.

Individual flats can be attractive investments, too, with studios for as little as £20,000 and one-bedroom flats for £30,000 — although yields may be a percentage point or two lower.

The real surprise, perhaps, is quite how few Berliners have themselves taken the plunge and bought. But old habits die hard: housing in the east was owned by the state during the communist years, and after the Wall came down in 1989, blocks of flats were largely sold en masse to big corporations rather than to the tenants who lived in them.

West Berliners, too, were traditionally reluctant to buy — rents were heavily subsidised, while the prospect of Russian tanks rolling in made the city seem anything but a safe investment. Home ownership was also rejected as “petit bourgeois” by students and other denizens of Berlin’s thriving hippie scene.

“There was no economic urge to buy property,” said Klink. “It was not like Britain, where people sit around dinner tables discussing how much their property has gone up.”

There are signs that attitudes are slowly changing — not least because the old rent subsidies and controls have largely fallen away — but in the meantime the city remains very much a buyers’ market. Whether you opt for a single flat or whole block, though, choosing where to buy can require some careful research.

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