The Statistical Offices of the Federation and the Länder provide information on electronic data submissions and the survey schedule to make it as easy and convenient as possible for housing companies to perform their legal duty to provide information.

• From January 2019: The statistical offices will run a search for local housing companies and write to them at their headquarters, asking them to provide initial information (e.g. contact details and number of apartments) via an electronic reporting form.
• From the 4th quarter of 2019: The housing companies will be sent a written request to electronically submit an inventory list with all the addresses at which they own or manage living space.
  
• 4th quarter of 2021: The regional statistical offices will ask the housing companies to submit updated information on their housing inventory by a certain deadline. Companies that manage owner-occupied apartments may be allowed to submit lists of owners under certain circumstances.
• May 2022: The housing companies will submit a file containing the requested information on buildings and housing by the deadline.

Electronic data submissions

Companies are obliged to submit data electronically in accordance with Section 11a of the Federal Statistics Act (BStatG). The Statistical Offices of the Federation and the Länder will provide a standardised, web-based platform for the 2022 census: eSTATISTIK.core.

The technical requirements and contents of the specified data formats have to be observed to ensure the quick submission of the information to be provided during the 2022 census. Dataset descriptions and other technical resources will be provided in our survey database in due course.

The technical resources for the submission of inventory lists and lists of owners can be found in the survey database using the search terms “0274” and “0644”. The technical resources for the submission of data for the 2022 census of buildings and housing can be found by searching for “0226”.

Delimitation of buildings

When processing the various surveys involved in the 2022 census, the correct delimitation of buildings is particularly important. This corresponds to the address used by the registration authorities and may differ from the designations used for the management of buildings. As data has to be submitted for each address, business entities must be divided into addresses. A definition of the term “building” and more information on the delimitation of buildings can be found in our survey database (please refer to the notes on the dataset descriptions for the submission of inventory lists and data for the census of buildings and housing).