The euro crisis saw wealthy Europeans and institutional investors discover and move in on what they viewed as Berlin’s undervalued property market. Every year until 2020, about 30,000 people arrived on average, without new apartments being built.ĭuring that time, additional shocks changed the market fundamentals. After a population slump in the early 2000s, as many Berliners moved out to the greener plains of surrounding Brandenburg, the city’s population began growing again in 2012. German states have no legal competence to decide on such issues, the constitutional court ruled, leaving tenants scrambling twice over: to pay their original, unfrozen rent and the rent they saved during the 14-month experiment.Ī lack of new apartments remains the Achilles heel of the Berlin property market. That February 2020 cap, cheered by the city’s 1.5 million tenants, saw Berlin impose a freeze on rents – until, after 14 months, a court ruled it “void in its entirety” in April 2021. Photograph: iStockĮxperts point to a number of factors for the current situation: a lack of new builds, a surge of new arrivals since the end of the pandemic and a market correction after a failed attempt by Berlin’s city state to cap rents. “Nestled in the corner of an image of the room,” wrote one traumatised Berlin flat-hunter in a recent online post, “lay a reflection of the male photographer’s genitals.” Rent capĪ lack of new apartments remains the Achilles heel of the Berlin property market. “Finding an affordable apartment in Berlin was never as difficult as today,” noted Berlin Hyp, a property financier in the capital, in a recent report.īerlin has gone from sleeping beauty of German real estate market to the second most expensive rental city behind Munich (€17.39/m2), with an average of 200 applicants for every Berlin apartment advertised.Ĭompounding a serious housing shortage are tales of financial and sexual exploitation from those offering flats – or rooms – to let. Ask anyone looking for an apartment now and the terms most often heard about the rental market are “broken”, “dysfunctional” and “desperate”. Anyone arriving in the city 20 years ago had their pick of apartments, at bargain basement rates, and landlords often happy to throw in a free fitted kitchen. For much of the post-wall period, the German capital was the big easy. What sounds like another day in the life of a flat hunter in Dublin is the new reality, too, in Berlin. An hour after the original viewing time, the apartment was gone and the queue of hopeful tenants went home hopeless. After an hour online, the landlord had 600 queries and took the advertisement down. On a chilly April day, the queue of hopefuls snaked 150m around the block, all hoping for the same thing: a 74 m2 three-room apartment, with a separate kitchen and bathroom for €1,074 a month.
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