I Beat the Berlin Rental Market with a Python Script | Hacker News Reader

I Beat the Berlin Rental Market with a Python Script

giansegato.com

67 pointsgiansegato28 comments

This is why regulation of housing introduces more nightmares than it solves. Rent control eliminates used inventory. Building regulations limit new inventory.

Solve it by changing the laws to allow new buildings of all sorts, especially very small and cheap apartments. And by getting rid of rent control.

So much yes. The only way to actually fix the housing market would be to just… build more houses. Increase the supply, put market pressure to the existing rents, and prices will go down eventually.

The problem is that it's a rather long-term cure, and I don't know if there's enough political capital for this. It will probably be there soon, considering how big they screwed up this time around

I did something similar with Kijiji in Montreal to find a decently priced apartment. It ended up working quite nicely and I found a 3 1/2 lease transfer well located in an older building for 700$. I've since employed it for other items that I kind of want, but not enough to trawl through Kijiji regularly for.

For reference it was easy to set up because Kijiji thankfully still has RSS and getting timely notifications through Huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn and Pushover was simple.

Facebook classifieds seems to ve eating the market a bit, I haven't tried scraping fb, I imagine there are barriers, is this true?

So the relatively affordable apartments go to those with the best tech skills... Gotta love rent controls. This is exactly like SF in 2000

this is sad

>"Berlin has a massive undersupply of housing — a widespread phenomenon in western cities.

Usually, this means that prices tend to increase. That’s what used to happen in Berlin too. Then, a couple of years ago, the city municipality passed a controversial rent control policy that prevents price increase for at least 5 years.

It was a very bad idea: the market completely froze and became illiquid.

Housing supply contracted (instead of expanding), due to lack of financial incentives."

PDS: I've seen this exact same effect before, in other housing markets...

Also, a psychological observation:

Once people who have had a housing problem in the past find an adequate housing situation for themselves, they, not seeing housing as a problem anymore, are no longer inclined to vote for the politicians and/or public housing policies that would help large amounts of other people with their housing problems...

Housing, that is, getting the issues around housing exactly correct from a law/government/macroeconomic/public policy perspective -- with a rapidly expanding world population and many homeless people in the world's cities -- is, or will be, I think, as future historians look back in time:

One of the defining issues of Earth's 21st Century History...

I've been looking for land for a while, and often thought of making a tool will let you input the normal filters for property search, but include things like distance/time to specific locations (Library, Grocery, Home Depot, Costco, etc.), as well as to major freeways. Other ideas including giving ratings based on terrain, flood plains, etc.

> I honestly have no clue if there’s a market for this product.

I bet you there is. Try offering it as a service of some sort.

I think this is a situation where the tools only give you a leg up when not everyone is using them (and become practically a requirement when everyone is).

In the immediate term, as someone in a high CoL city with an out-of-control rental market I'd really like these tools to be open source. Then at least they're extremely useful in distinguishing you from other applicants, by virtue of being an 'exclusive' tool, in the sense that not everyone has enough technical expertise to deploy the necessary services to run them. It also has the benefit of encouraging collaboration around this ecosystem of tooling (the user pool is after all already restricted to software developers, data scientists, and fairly technical hobbyists)

But then if you open up the hosted version to the public as a paid service (someone probably will, and it's really only fair to offer the same strategic advantage to less technically inclined people; perhaps some of those people need it more) you may end up in a situation where it becomes a requisite in the rental search; you'd be at a significant disadvantage if you don't use it.

I don't really have any concrete conclusion from this train of thought, just that it's a complex situation which can really only be fixed with regulatory oversight, and in the mean time these markets will arise to give people an advantage, that also aren't equal-opportunity due to cost.

> I think this is a situation where the tools only give you a leg up when not everyone is using them (and become practically a requirement when everyone is).

The conclusion I'm drawing from this is that OP should offer it as a service for a very high price. Imagine if it cost $1000 or even $5000 up front and made some guarantee of your money back if you didn't find an apartment. That way the service wouldn't get overloaded and OP can pay for his new yacht at the same time.

I was about to comment the same thing, but you beat me to it.

This sort of edge only helps if it’s scarce. If widely available, it ends up being table stakes and breaks the advantage.

Isn't (s)he? To me it read rather like a quirky advertisement (mixed with a healthy dose of FUD). I was a bit surprised by the flawless (to this non-native speaker) English (and yes, there are bilingual Germans who occasionally get that right, but one can hardly expect such, much less in some random blog).

I was further more confused by the multiple mentioning of 'houses'. The rental market for houses in Berlin is slim, in Kreuzberg (and other near-center districts) it'll be zilch -- there it's apartments only. As if the application was meant to be applicable to other real estate markets...

OP here!

Thanks for the compliment on my English skills. I'm an Italian immigrant, actually. I've been focusing a lot on my writing, and I'm part of a community of writers that help me out with that.

> it read rather like a quirky advertisement

I assure it wasn't. I mean, it was, but for something different from what you expect: I'm trying to build an audience online, and this blog post is the funnel opening to my Twitter account. [1]

That being said, I'm indeed trying to build a product out of those experiments, and maybe I will get some side money from it. It'd be awesome, but that's not my core, first goal

Happy to answer more questions if you have any!

[1] https://twitter.com/giansegato

Your application will be perfect if you manage to calculate the bias effect of the name. In other words if your name is Peter, Giovanni or Ahmed it does play a role if you get to rent the place or not. My name is José by the way.

lol, that's absolutely nuts

I've heard from people that many landlords randomize viewings from the first batch of applicants - I'm actually thinking of working on a weighting system to make the whole thing a bit more meritocratic, because right now it's frustrating at best, racist at worst

From my time spent in Berlin it almost seemed like there were more people speaking English than German. Perhaps it's just what my ear picked up as a non-German speaker though.

Berlin has been arguably the most international city in Germany for a long time. During my stay in Summer of 2017 I did hear a lot of (American) English, much more than in the nineties, chiefly in Prenzlberg and Mitte though. There was even a proper American greasy breakfast restaurant serving pancakes and bad coffee (Ok, I made the bad coffee part up). Every German learned some English in school (there was a Generation which learned Russian in the East instead though), but w/o sufficient practice, many aren't comfortable using it later in life. With landlords this will be hit or miss.

This is a really neat project! I can follow and dupe everything in the writeup until the OP casually mentions:

> To get these numbers I trained two supervised models. I fine-tuned the pipeline and hyperparameters with genetic programming on an AWS GPU-heavy machine.

Can anyone recommend some ways to level up a bit in this domain to feel more comfortable? I'm somewhat familiar and understand the underlying concepts to a certain extent, such as supervised vs nonsupervised, but need hands-on practice, what do you recommend?

I've done something similar (not in German market) but instead decided to have a chat bot inform me whenever there was a new offer matching my criterias and it also helped me find a flat cheap and in the place I wanted. But your post inspires me to improve that further :)

I have done some scraping on my own of some real estate listing websites on my city and applied some filters.

The OP goes much deeper into that idea and I can totally see the need for such a thing. I didn't go much deeper in the idea as I have found something something interesting meanwhile, but this is a need, for sure.

Really cool use of data. I wonder how you want to make an app out of it though without immediately getting legal trouble (Abmahnung) since you scraped the house listings. A friend of mine did something similar for research purposes and there it was a huge grey zone.

The post states: >"There are two elements that influence your ability to be selected and get the contract: your profile, and your speed."

Can someone say what "profile" the author is referring to here?

Also the apartment photo in the post shows a newish looking almost 64 square meter place with a balcony in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg on Karl Marx Allee for 1497.56 Euros. This seems like a decent location in a good neighborhood with a decent amount of space. Is this considered expensive for Berlin right now?

Hey, OP here!

> what "profile" the author is referring to here?

Profile means anything that can tell the landlord if you're a trusted party that won't default on them: your income, your credit score, your perceived "safety", your language skills, but also if you own a pet, how long you've been together your partner (if any), etc. It's hard to impossible to evict someone, so they're trying to be extra sure you're a "safe bet".

> Is this considered expensive for Berlin right now?

Well, that's a Figma mockup - anyway, the data is realistic. You have to consider two things: 1. it's not about money (due to rent control), it's all about lack of supply, 2. the salaries are lower than other places - eg. for devs it's extremely hard to go over 70-80k/y

> "profile"

Things like whether you have dogs, kids, are a smoker.

Or other things that you're not supposed to discriminate by according to law (looks "foreign", doesn't speak German or with a strong accent).

And then the non-obvious things like your financials (what is the likelihood of paying rent or lack thereof) or connections.

But I think the article doesn't specify actually what they mean by profile.

Thanks for the clarification.

I had a few follow up questions:

Is this profile usually a verbal communication with you and the landlord then or do they expect to see written proof of those profile details during a viewing appointment?

What would an "reasonable" price be for the mock up listing of the 65 square meter place in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg be then?

Lastly aside from rent I'm guessing the two biggest overheads are power and internet? What could one expect those to be?

> Things like whether you have dogs, kids, are a smoker.

Or have a German ID card (Personalausweiß). Last time I tried to rent there (2017) I had a hard time finding a place as most landlords insisted that I'd be showing them my ID card (mine expired while living abroad). I think without it, it'll be additional hassle with the Einwohnermeldeamt for you and the landlord (not sure about that, but some landlords wont be either).

In terms of average rental price It is very expensive for Berlin. I pay 750 all inclusive in a better location for the same size.

The kicker: got my contract signed five years ago.

There’s a stop on rent increases for a reason.

Yes, that's quite expensive.

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