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Datamining a Flat in Munich

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Re: Datamining a Flat in Munich

#131

Post by davidroetzel »

probably_wrong wrote: post #58
davidroetzel wrote: post #37

I do not know about the situation in Munich, but I spent lots of time looking for a place in Bonn last year and from my experience the approach from the article has one serious flaw: While the real estate websites offer contact forms to send e-mails, many people hate dealing with e-mails. Landlords and even "professional" real estate agents often ignore e-mails. Sometimes it is because of the sheer volume they get, b…

I was going at first to agree with you based on my experience with Berlin: when the ads there give a particular date in which the apartment will be shown, those interested have to fill a form right after seeing it. So in this situation there's no incentive for the owner to check the e-mails. However, that doesn't explain why both the Italian girl and Hanz from Munich got over a 90% answer rate - if they didn't check…

Do not get me wrong, I do not disagree with his findings. That is probably very accurate and that is awful.

But originally he was not out to mine this data. He actually needed a place to live, and I wanted to point out that he might have approached this the wrong way.

Personally I prefer e-mail over phone calls. A lot. So this was not obvious to me up until my experience last year.

Re: Datamining a Flat in Munich

#132

Post by dusandusan »

freyfogle wrote: post #72
stef25 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you scrape those sites, or use their rss feeds or ... ? I think it's a great concept, just wonder about the legality of it.

We have contracts with and datafeeds from all of them. We've been in business since 2006, in Germany since 2008. We work very closely with our partners to try to improve the data. It's not always easy. I gave a talk about this at csv,conf in Berlin in July, slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/lokku/a-living-hell-lessons-learne...

Great slides, thanks a lot for the link.

"Unless you hate life, do NOT try to scrape real estate data"

With this conclusion, do you mean web scraping or just processing the datafeeds of your partners?

Re: Datamining a Flat in Munich

#133

Post by fiatjaf »

dazbradbury wrote: post #98
fiatjaf wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. Now that you explained it, I think this is a GREAT business model. Thank you for existing. (Does it work great? Do you have a lot of paying customers?)

We have over 15k landlords, and let a property on average in less than a week - so yes, I think it works pretty well. :-) The more people using our platform, the better it gets, so really we just need to work on our marketing - starting with making sure people understand our concept from the word go. Would you mind explaining why you thought there was a charge, and what pages helped you understand the business better…

When you land the website, you see two boxes, one is labeled "TENANTS" and the other "LANDLORDS". One says "NO FEES", the other "ONLY £29".

It was clear to me that landlords had to pay a fee.

Re: Datamining a Flat in Munich

#134

Post by jonalmeida »

What was your dataset of people who were applying? If a girl with an Italian name gets 90% and a guy with an arab name and is younger than 25 gets 1%, what about the in-between?

I'd be curious to know where I stand..

Re: Datamining a Flat in Munich

#135

Post by stef25 »

rmc wrote: post #78
stef25 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you use the law to punish someone for not responding to an email from 21 year old Mohammed asking if he can rent your apartment? Renting out an apartment can lead to some very difficult situations (basically because the law isn't going to help you get out of them). Everyone I know that rents out properties here in Belgium applies a very strict filter when selecting tenants; I would do the same and not feel bad ab…

Can you use the law to punish someone for not responding to an email from 21 year old Mohammed asking if he can rent your apartment? Yes. If you will not rent out your apartment to someone based on their ethnicity/race, that's illegal. If you don't like it, get out of the apartment rental business. It's just so hard to prosecute people for it.

Realistically nobody would know if you're using ethnicity as the basis of your decision right?

Re: Datamining a Flat in Munich

#136

Post by lafar6502 »

saosebastiao wrote: post #123
lafar6502 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe i base my decision on flipping a coin? That's certainly not your (or anyone else's) business - the point is I can do that because until I sign a rental contract I'm free to do whatever I want. There's no contract - there's no legal binding between the owner and a 'candidate'. Any obligations, duties and rights start after the deal is made.

Wrong. Your obligations and duties start the second you make an offer. You may not have obligations to a tenant that doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean you don't have to comply with the applicable laws. Based off of your opinions in this thread, I highly suggest that you never rent out your property. Your opinions on what the law says will likely end up with you in jail.

So please enlighten me what are the applicable laws and how they can put me in jail for cancelling an offer or choosing one candidate and not the other.

Re: Datamining a Flat in Munich

#137

Post by lafar6502 »

rmc wrote: post #124
lafar6502 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, they'd have to prove I did something illegal. What makes you think so? Hopefully we still have the right to say just "sorry, I changed my mind, the offer is no longer valid" or "I chose another offer, sorry".

The same way they prove any other type of crime. Sometimes people are blatant (e.g. the english hoteliers who refused to rent a room to a same sex couple), or when you put other facts together it becomes obvious (e.g. at 1:00pm the landlord tells someone with a foreign accent that it's unavailable, but at 3:00pm they tell someone with a different accent that it's available), or sometimes an offer is withdrawn when a…

That's why you have to be picky and careful when you decide to rent to someone you don't know. You don't want to be accused of something that's 'obvious' to someone, but is not necessarily the truth. So you naturally prefer people you know and can understand and rule out potential troublemakers early - sorry... And if you have 30 candidates to choose from, well, you know the answer - everyone has some preferences and will use them for making a choice. I'm not very surprised Germans have a preference for young single men of their own nationality with high paid jobs. That's still quite far away from being racist imho - this is just maximizing chances for a trouble-free, decent income.

Re: Datamining a Flat in Munich

#138

Post by wavefunction »

fiatjaf wrote: post #93
anvarik wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the heck shouldn't I classify this as discrimination? He tried Hans, an Italian female name, and his own, I believe is Karim. And he gets less replies than any other. He probably wrote a pretty darn good e-mail saying how educated and well-behaved he is, bla bla from Paris have degrees etc, but guess what, no replies. Just because of his name! That is what I call discrimination, and in Germany it is pretty common…

Maybe "discrimination" is other name for "bad decision when good information about the other part is lacking".

Maybe, if you're unable to own up to calling your discrimination "discrimination."

Re: Datamining a Flat in Munich

#139

Post by lafar6502 »

stef25 wrote: post #135
rmc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you use the law to punish someone for not responding to an email from 21 year old Mohammed asking if he can rent your apartment? Yes. If you will not rent out your apartment to someone based on their ethnicity/race, that's illegal. If you don't like it, get out of the apartment rental business. It's just so hard to prosecute people for it.

Realistically nobody would know if you're using ethnicity as the basis of your decision right?

... but certainly someone could accuse you of being a racist because you didn't rent to them. So it's quite natural you as a landlord would prefer to have only candidates of same race and same nationality (not difficult at all, just don't respond to anyone with a foreign name) Try forcing more 'anti-discrimination' laws and people will rather keep the appartment unoccupied than risk being taken to court

Re: Datamining a Flat in Munich

#140

Post by ryanjshaw »

freyfogle wrote: post #61
ryanjshaw wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody unfamiliar with London but considering moving there, it would be great if instead of specifying a geographical radius for the search I could specify a commuting time radius with respect to the City. This would probably be useful even to natives, as I'm sure there are probably many areas where people overestimate commuting times and consequently avoid an area that otherwise should see greater housing deman…

This gets asked for occasionally. The thing is though, there are not that many people who truly have no idea where they want to live. Most people have at least some idea based on where their friends already live, where they will be working, etc Over the years I have seen numerous services that allowed people to search the way you describe. They all typically die out after a year or two, as all evidence suggests there…

Thanks for the insight!
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