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I need to find an apartment

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Re: I need to find an apartment

#301

Post by MinorTom »

bogomipz wrote: post #176
pph wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I am also looking for a flat in Berlin I can only say: At least you got a response. It's nearly impossible to find anything below 20€/m² cold rent and some people are trying to (illegally) sell on old, cheap contracts for 6000€ and more.

Can I ask what is cold rent here, does that does not include utilities or similar? Also how does the second illegal thing work, is that subletting basically?

> Also how does the second illegal thing work, is that subletting basically?

I'm not sure if this is what gp meant, but:

In some cases the current tenant (who is looking to move out) offers you the landlord's contact details if you agree to buy their kitchen for way too much money. This works because for a landlord looking for new tenants is a lot of hassle so they're likely to take you if you contact them.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#302

Post by vgel »

aetherspawn wrote: post #297
mosseater wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at a startup that aggregated apartment listings. Long gone now, we couldn't compete with Zillow or Apartments.com. But what we were doing is just aggregating all of the rental websites we could possibly scrape into one interface. It was hard. There are so many scams out there. If you are not hand curating listings, you have to rely on somewhat novel approaches to filter out all the bad data. For exampl…

What sort of scam would mention Jesus or God in the description?

They say they're out of the country on a mission trip and are OK renting the place out below market to a responsible person (faith preferred but not required) who will take good care of it. Then they ask for a "viewing fee" before they send you a code for the non-existent lockbox with the keys.

Source: got to the "send me a viewing fee in itunes gift cards" stage of one of these scams, once. Googled the initial email and it's a common scan template.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#303

Post by thiht »

I did the same thing when apartment hunting in Rennes, France! And this is how I found my current apartment :)

There’s great value in building scrapers specialized to a particular city, country-wide aggregators are not enough.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#304

Post by wildmanx »

ng55QPSK wrote: post #288
koevet wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berlin pretty much built out? The city has a huge "hole" in the center - Tempelhofer Feld. 355 hectares of land that at some point it was decided to leave untouched. Complete waste of space that could be used to build thousands of units.

I really wonder what happens when Manhattan will discuss to put more buildings into central park? Tempelhofer Feld is needed as greenfield in the central city for climate reasons.

You can't have it all. No new areas for housing and no higher buildings and keep real estate prices and rents at a certain level and more people move into the city. That's impossible. Something must give.

Ideally it's a compromise, everything gives a little. A few more areas for housing, a little higher buildings, a bit higher prices, a bit more attractive rural areas.

Manhatten is one of the densest populated urban centers in the world. Nearly no other green areas, even street trees are a rare sight. Everything is concrete. Berlin on the other hand is very green. Parks, trees on the street, Tiergarten, Grunewald, and yes, Tempelhofer Feld. You could build housing for tens of thousands of people while still keeping the area green with lots of trees and parks for people to relax in.

Just keeping it a huge empty space and at the same time complain about high rents is ridiculous. This is not solved by complaining about money hungry investors. It's the supply-vs-demand ratio that's the problem. Not greed. (It may play a role, but would not have much of a chance without the underlying issue.) Of course you can keep it "for climate reasons". But that comes with a price and you need to live with those consequences. "Mietpreisbremse" is not going to solve any of those.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#305

Post by FredPret »

barnabee wrote: post #85
pimlottc wrote: post #29

It frustrates me that there are so many "information programs" like these that are computationally easy to solve but rely on the free availability of information. Sadly, companies like athome.lu have no interest in sharing this data and so here we are in 2022, still having to manually search multiple sites. In Internet olden times, we dreamed about automated agents that would run searches on your behalf, scour the we…

This is why companies must be forced to make their data available. The value that could be unleashed is insane.

What a hot take. I want more public data as much as anyone, but forcing companies to make an asset “available” hasn’t worked out so well historically.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#306

Post by ziml77 »

aetherspawn wrote: post #297
mosseater wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at a startup that aggregated apartment listings. Long gone now, we couldn't compete with Zillow or Apartments.com. But what we were doing is just aggregating all of the rental websites we could possibly scrape into one interface. It was hard. There are so many scams out there. If you are not hand curating listings, you have to rely on somewhat novel approaches to filter out all the bad data. For exampl…

What sort of scam would mention Jesus or God in the description?

The kind that is trying to build trust with religious people.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#307

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ng55QPSK wrote: post #289
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is not a law it's a referendum that most likely will never be adopted as it's illegal It reflects a political environment that makes renting risky. And illegal laws can still cause hardship while they're being stayed and struck down. The corporate landlords can afford to fight. Single-home landlords cannot. This time the referendum constrained itself to corporate landlords; next time it may not.

From the outside, this sounds scary. But if you look closer how germany works, forced selling to the state or city (at the current market price) is quite often happening in building infrastructure like streets, autobahn, railways or airports. If there is an overwhelming public interest, the rights of owners can be limited. And btw: it's stated in the constitution, that ownership introduces also responsibility to the…

> If there is an overwhelming public interest, the rights of owners can be limited

Eminent domain exists everywhere. Berlin’s politics are more extreme than the norm. Most homeowners would pay a low single-digit percent of their home value to insure against expropriation in that environment. Taking a property off the rental market is analogous; sacrificing a cash flow to safeguard the investment.

We can go back and forth on theory all day. I’m m reflecting what people I know are doing. Being flippant with (or even demonising) owners’ interests circles back into affordability crises worldwide, from Berlin to San Francisco.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#308

Post by giraffe_lady »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #200
bluefirebrand wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tenant has the right to refuse to have the home shown when they are moving out and the landlord is trying to find new tenants? How about maintenance workers fixing appliances or something? That seems pretty hard to believe. Are you sure the tenant isn't just allowed to refuse "a time slot" but also must offer alternatives?

Outside of necessary repairs or maintenance, you can legally refuse unwanted visits from the landlord to the apartment you are paying rent for. Story time: A couple of years ago, I was looking to buy an apartment and saw one spacious apartment centrally located that was way below market price but had no pictures in the ad. I called the agent and asked when can I visit as soon as possible since there's no pictures. Ag…

sorry but every part of this is good? you can't go in someone's home if they don't want you to. you can't kick someone out of their home if they don't want to leave.

someone being this hostile about it is rare but it sometimes happening is a necessary consequence of these rights.

anyway though in most places our protections are not this extreme. you can refuse a specific visit but have to provide a time when they can come later.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#309

Post by closeparen »

pooper wrote: post #295
mosseater wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at a startup that aggregated apartment listings. Long gone now, we couldn't compete with Zillow or Apartments.com. But what we were doing is just aggregating all of the rental websites we could possibly scrape into one interface. It was hard. There are so many scams out there. If you are not hand curating listings, you have to rely on somewhat novel approaches to filter out all the bad data. For exampl…

> I used to work at a startup that aggregated apartment listings. Long gone now, we couldn't compete with Zillow or Apartments.com. But what we were doing is just aggregating all of the rental websites we could possibly scrape into one interface. [...] > We couldn't have the most up to date data, that was determined by how fast we could go back to scrape a listing. And often times we were knee deep in a battle to avo…

SQL Server should have no problem serving hundreds to thousands of queries per second unless the query is really pathological (which it might be!).

Re: I need to find an apartment

#310

Post by matteuan »

ng55QPSK wrote: post #288
koevet wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berlin pretty much built out? The city has a huge "hole" in the center - Tempelhofer Feld. 355 hectares of land that at some point it was decided to leave untouched. Complete waste of space that could be used to build thousands of units.

I really wonder what happens when Manhattan will discuss to put more buildings into central park? Tempelhofer Feld is needed as greenfield in the central city for climate reasons.

like central park? It's grass and asphalt without a tree, in hot days in summer becomes a furnace. Better put some buildings AND a nice park
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