181–190 of 319 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is getting lucky walking down the street "creative", exactly?
Just keep your eyes open is all I mean. Life is strange, you never know what you're going to find.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't make any of those claims at all. I just pointed out that if there is a privacy issue, it's not the lister's privacy at stake.
I'm still not sure renters really have a reasonable expectation of privacy when the place they are living in is listed for rent or sale by someone else. In most places renters are only granted 24 hours notice to have complete strangers come walk through their living spaces while the space is shown off. They have no real right to refuse to allow that. If people start knocking on their door asking to come look at the p…
In some EU countries they do. The landlord need to ask permission to have visitors at your place and the tenant has the right to refuse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have friends who used to let their Berlin flat. They stopped doing it after the apartment-seizure law passed [1]. Better to lose the income than lose the property (or be caught fighting an illegal law). [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/12/03/1061333538/berlin-voted-for-t...
What you're referencing is not a law it's a referendum that most likely will never be adopted as it's illegal. On top of that, how does that referendum affect your friends unless they run a giant business with thousands of apartments (to be exact 3000 or more)? And at that scale it's certainly cheaper to fight in court.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question, though, is: why doesn't this converge to a single monopolist agency, like in the rest of capitalism?
Guess who spends the most money on lobbying? https://www.statista.com/statistics/257344/top-lobbying-spen...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just keep your eyes open is all I mean. Life is strange, you never know what you're going to find.
That's more of a banal aphorism then a piece of concrete actionable advice when trying to find a place to live. Expecting to get a rent below market rate by arbitrarily walking into somebody on the street is just...
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought my house in the late-ish 90s before the web was really a big thing and certainly before things like Google StreetView. I spent a lot of time driving around to see places where I ended up not even stopping the car once I got there. Today, there would be a lot more information available. However, as you suggest, I assume all that available information probably increases the efficiency of connecting a property…
We almost didn’t stop into the house we now live in. It was #10 of 10 of open houses on a rainy Saturday and we were just looking to get a sense of things we both liked/didn’t like. This listing had terrible photos and the building had almost no updates since 1993. We walked in and in 2 minutes knew we’d want to buy the place, in part because it showed so poorly and the sellers were motivated to close. Zillow was a t…
Various things cost me a fair bit of money, effort, and angst that I'm glad I didn't know about at the time. But, at the end of the day, I got a ridiculously good deal--especially by today's standards--for a semi-rural place only about an hour out of Boston.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Population of Berlin has hardly changed in the past 30 years, it grows at an annual a rate of like 0.2%. How is this madness possible? Edit: There were 3.5 million residents in 1993. It is projected to reach 3.6 million residents in 2029 [1] It's got to be something to do with financial markets and foreign investment 1 - https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/204296/berlin/population
The simple answer is rent control: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin...
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because a law called "Mietpreisbremse" makes it entirely unattractive to rent out. That's a strict regulation on how much rent you are allowed to take. And that's just the direct financial aspect. Once a tenant lives in your place, it's really hard to get rid of them. Even if they act like total scumbags, trash the place, disturb the neighbors, pay their rent late. No reasonable investor finds it attractive to build…
Your post is bordering on propaganda. First of all: the problem at the core is that Berlin is pretty much built out, there is not much space any more to expand to. Yes, skyscrapers could be a solution, but everyone seriously thinking about this gets invited to look at Frankfurt am Main and then forget about the idea because that city is simply hideous. Skyscrapers are very unwelcome in Germany because of that example…