Running a WEG without a property manager in Germany

Ask around for a property management company for a six-unit building in Germany and you will hear the same answer again and again: not interested. Industry surveys suggest that roughly half of German management firms are declining new mandates, and small associations with fewer than ten units sit at the very bottom of their wish list, too much work, too little fee. If your building cannot find a manager, you are not breaking any rules. Under German condominium law (the Wohnungseigentumsgesetz, which governs every WEG in Germany) there is no general legal obligation to appoint a manager. A WEG without a property manager, known as Selbstverwaltung, is a recognised way of running the building. What the law does impose is a set of duties that stay in place whether or not a professional handles them.

Is a WEG without a manager legal?

Yes. The law treats the Verwalter as the standard arrangement, not as a requirement. Whether to appoint one is decided by the owners with a simple majority resolution, and they are equally free to resolve to manage the building themselves.

In practice, self-management is most common in small buildings of two to eight units, where the owners know each other and the workload is manageable. Those are precisely the buildings the market squeeze hits hardest: for a firm that calculates per property, a tiny mandate barely pays, and the fees it would have to charge strike many communities as out of proportion.

Legal, however, does not automatically mean advisable.

Before a community takes over its own management, it should understand who will represent it towards the outside world, because that is exactly where the 2020 reform changed the rules.

Who represents the association if no manager is appointed?

Since the WEMoG reform, the community of owners is itself a legal entity: it signs contracts in its own name, and it can sue and be sued. That means someone has to sign on its behalf.

If there is no manager, § 9b WEG provides that all owners represent the community jointly. The insurance policy, the heating engineer, the roofer's contract, in principle, every owner has to act together, unless the meeting passes a resolution authorising one owner to handle certain matters alone. Without that authorisation, even opening a bank account turns into a test of patience.

One mistake that surfaces again and again in self-managed buildings: the monthly charges flow through one owner's private account. That decision backfires at the latest when a flat is sold, an owner dies or the first dispute erupts. The community needs its own account in its own name, and banks will usually ask for the resolution that settles who may represent it.

Which duties remain mandatory?

Self-management saves the manager's fee, not the manager's work. Everything the law assigns to the Verwalter now has to be organised by the owners themselves:

• Convene and chair at least one owners meeting (Eigentümerversammlung) per year
• Pass resolutions, announce them and record them without delay in the Beschluss-Sammlung, the official register of resolutions
• Draw up an annual budget (Wirtschaftsplan) and resolve on the advance payments
• Prepare the annual service charge statement (Hausgeldabrechnung) after each financial year
• Keep the maintenance reserve, monitor payments and archive receipts in good order

The register of resolutions is the piece people underestimate. It is not paperwork for its own sake: resolutions bind successors in title, so anyone buying a flat must be able to look up what the community has decided in recent years. A missing or patchy register breeds exactly the disputes a small community can least afford.

What if one owner demands a manager?

Self-management comes with a silent proviso: it only works while everyone supports it. Under § 18 WEG, every single owner may demand management that meets the standard of proper administration, and since the reform, that standard in principle includes appointing a certified manager.

There is one exception for small schemes: in buildings with fewer than nine units, an owner may act as manager without certification, as long as fewer than a third of the owners demand a certified one.

Legal note: if the majority ignores a justified demand, the individual owner can enforce the appointment of a manager through the courts. The costs of those proceedings are generally borne by the community, making the dispute more expensive than the fee it was meant to save.

How do self-managed WEGs organise day to day?

The work a professional bundles into one job gets spread across several shoulders. A proven split: one person runs the account and chases arrears, a second deals with tradespeople and quotes, a third handles invitations, minutes and the register of resolutions. An advisory board (Verwaltungsbeirat) can give those roles a formal footing.

The second lever is order in the paperwork. Statements, resolutions, insurance policies and maintenance contracts must remain findable even after the owner who filed them moves out. Software built for owners associations, such as Vecinly, keeps invitations, resolutions, accounts and documents in one place, particularly valuable when nobody manages the building for a living.

And there is a point at which the professional belongs back in the picture: a roof renovation with subsidy applications, a high share of rented-out flats with ever-changing contacts, growing arrears, or simply a falling-out among the owners. Mistakes in the annual statement and missed deadlines get expensive fast, at that point the manager's fee stops being a cost and starts being insurance.

A WEG without a manager is not a stopgap but a legitimate model, provided the community takes seriously the duties the law does not abolish along with the manager: the annual meeting, the budget, the statement, the register of resolutions. Owners who organise those four building blocks properly, and who are honest about their own limits, can run their building well for years.

Information current as of July 2026. This article is for general information on German WEG law and does not constitute legal advice.