Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's great that worked out for you. It'd be great if people didn't have to get creative to find basic housing.
Since when did housing become a right?
I need to find an apartment
81–90 of 319 posts
Re: I need to find an apartment
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
You gotta get creative. Walking down the street I met this one guy who's like 70, eccentric, military vet, owns the house, and rents it out individual rooms for $550/month. He's paid off the mortgage, just needs to pay taxes, and he's clearly making a profit since he's retired and constantly has new projects working on the house. For context that's 1/3 asking price out here.
How is getting lucky walking down the street "creative", exactly?
[deleted]
Re: I need to find an apartment
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's great that worked out for you. It'd be great if people didn't have to get creative to find basic housing.
Since when did housing become a right?
Since society decided it’s better to create housing than to allow an army of homeless people to burn the world to the ground.
Re: I need to find an apartment
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
why did landlords take their units off the market in berlin? because renting out is no longer interesting?
Dunno, it doesn't really make sense to me. Sale prices were around 20 years' of rent, so it seems like a great asset to hold. I assume they just wanted to cash out on rising prices.
> Sale prices were around 20 years' of rent
That's the same thing as 5% yield right? (Just that that's the way around I usually hear it, might be a regional thing.)
That sounds like perhaps the high end of normal range, but not extraordinary?
Re: I need to find an apartment
#85It 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.
Re: I need to find an apartment
#86I'm currently searching in Berlin and the market has become insane. Here's a response I got yesterday: "With more than 1200 prospective tenants, it was really difficult for the landlord to make a decision. Unfortunately, we have to inform you that the landlord has decided on other prospective tenants. Thank you for your understanding! "
The pandemic allowed remote work to flourish. Why are people still crowding the cities? And of all the places, specially Berlin. Not even that great of a city. A lot of my friends fled the city.
Cities offer more than just jobs.
Culture is also concentrated.
Re: I need to find an apartment
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
You pretty much have to buy an apartment in Berlin, that's been the case for the past 10 years or so. Landlords took them off the market and put them up for sale. You might still be able to find something decent for around 100k euro, I'm not sure.
why did landlords take their units off the market in berlin? because renting out is no longer interesting?
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 new rentals in German cities. Result is a shortage. And because of the shortage, rents skyrocket. And because of that, you have "Mietpreisbremse". And because of that, there is even less rentals and even more shortage.
If only anybody would understand that you can't fight the market like that.
Re: I need to find an apartment
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
why did landlords take their units off the market in berlin? because renting out is no longer interesting?
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…
Berlin politics also seriously discuss seizing landlords' properties [1]. It's stupid. It's illegal. But it makes the potential downside of renting out a home the value of the property. (Or the cost of defending against an illegal law.)
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/12/03/1061333538/berlin-voted-for-t...
Re: I need to find an apartment
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any place I can’t walk on well-traveled sidewalks to a coffee shop, restaurant, grocery store, etc. is a place not fit for human habitation.
I wonder how humans survived for the first, oh, 99% or so of the time we've been on earth?
For all that time, people had to walk to wherever they needed to get to, so yes, they had to pick places where what they needed was close by.
Re: I need to find an apartment
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like rent caps.
My initial reaction was that it sounds as if they're not charging nearly enough. You may want to be picky but that's ridiculous. But you may be right.
These 1:1200 are exceptional anecdotes that happen if you have some idealistic landlord that doesn't max out the allowed rent but rents it out at some price point that they consider reasonable, which is perhaps the rent from 20 years ago. Of course they get flooded with applications.
If they'd max out, they'd still get multiple applications, but maybe 10-30 of those, half of them from people with bad credit rating.
Still bad, but not as extreme as it sounds like.