Datamining a Flat in Munich
funnybretzel.svbtle.com
funnybretzel.svbtle.com
Sadly, this doesn't surprise me.
Across Europe, numerous anti-discrimination laws have been (rightfully) enacted, but it just pushes any inclination to discriminate that might exist into private. Oh, we "didn't receive" your e-mail, or oh, I "didn't see" your résumé.. This is why some people got upset about Google+ demanding real names and similar "use your real name" policies elsewhere, as even a name alone can be a huge trigger for discriminatory behavior.
I believe I have read a study (can't dig it up) where a simple switch to a female name in the context of a technical job made the response rate drop.
I graduated with a BSME from Nebraska, and my first name is Earle. I went for ~3 months without any responses to resumes or applications, until I added my middle name. I started working a new job within two weeks, and now have to go by my middle name at work. All because "Earle from Nebraska" must be a redneck hick.
My case is almost certainly not racially motivated, but literally the only change I made was my name.
i'm an asian guy with an ultra generic anglo first and last name and i've never really had any trouble getting interviews. in fact when i show up and i'm asian they usually have a nice little chuckle and are pleasantly surprised. generally asians in technology at the worker-level don't get discriminated against unless they have thick accents (which i don't).
i've seen resumes with asian first/last names that have a note under the name that says "natural born US citizen, authorized to work anywhere in the US and territories" or something to that effect. it's a good thing, in my opinion. it signals multiple things in one neat little sentence.
It's protected alongside the statuses of disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation, to more-or-less the same extent in theory.
There are, however, glaring exceptions when it comes to housing (due to how this protection intersects with property rights), as housing agency industry groups, housing charities, and various other charities explain across the Internet.
Funnily enough, statistically men crash more than women too - but it's illegal to charge men more, because that would be gender discrimination. It's also illegal to charge someone more for insurance because they are black, christian, or a vegetarian - regardless of how many accidents members of those groups get into. And yet if you are 24, have been driving more than 6 years without an accident, you will still pay more than someone who is 25 and has passed their exam last week. If that is not discrimination then I have absolutely no idea what is.
We'll see what the EU do eventually - but I'm going to bet the UK either ignore it or find a loophole.
In the EU this became illegal recently. It also applied to women, who live longer than men, so were being charged higher life assurance. It just shows how anti-sexism laws can, and do, benefit men.
Laws play their role. Sometimes they walk fine lines between usefulness, uselessness and harmfulness, but they are not unequivocally useless in all such cases. Consider the gay awakening. When I was in high school the world was a qualitatively different place for homosexuals. A worse place.
The axis around which culture has pivoted on this and other issues, is difficult to name. But, an important part of it is just defining, explaining, defending (and sometimes even legislating) what is by our standards an asshole position. If you are so hung up on the idea that men are shagging each other in this world that it affects how you interact with people, you are an asshole. Society says so.
To this day, many non assholes are uncomfortable with gays. Maybe it's conservatism, cultural habit, latent homosexuality, whatever. But, if you're talking to an intelligent young person chances are they'll think of you as a crazy asshole if you start making fidgety mean statements about gays. That's the cultural change and it's a powerful force.
Legislation is a part of that. Perfectly enforceable or not, it allows an avenue for enforcement of blatant cases and formalizes the moral position of our time. Thou shall not be a crazy asshole that gets bent out of shape around the idea of a gay neighbor.
Legislation's role in this is sometime minor, sometimes major and sometimes ineffective. I have no illusions about what legislation can achieve without the winds of change at its back.
But, there is such a thing as our society.
We'd all like to think we're better. That's what leads us down the path of legislating out way out of prejudice. It's not a solution. To me, the article suggests an alternative way to fight it: information. Forget equal opportunity, affirmative action, whatever label you want to put on it. Publishing the data, putting a name with the prejudice on display for everyone to see, is the proper fight. Then the people who profit from the prejudice, and those who participate in the system, can be pressured to change. Failing that, society can marginalize them.
So while you may not change a particular person's mind, you stand a chance of changing their kid's mind. There was a time, not that long ago, in America where if you were Black and drank from the wrong water fountain our sat at the wrong spot in a restaurant, you would be killed by a mob.
Legislation about segregation changed that for the better. Probably not in those living in the day, but their kids and kid's kids.
Many people are routinely convicted/fined/sued for anti-discrimination laws. So clearly they won't "always be able to manufactor plausible deniability".
- basic right of owner to rent property to anyone he likes without explaining the decision (and not to rent to anyone else...)
- basic right of hotel owner to accept anyone he choses (and deny access to anyone else)
- basic right of restarant manager to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else)
- basic right of transportation owner to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else)
- basic right of hospital operator to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else)
Now pick your minority: it might have been Jews or the Slavic for the Nazis, it might have been the blacks in South Africa -- or the US, or homosexuals in Russia. Or the red-headed, the fat, the old, ...
Once you step onto this path, it's hard to put hard stop someplace
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.
Not really. You could define some as basic services and deny discrimination on those. Much like e.g. some basic utilities are already prohibited from cutting off supply to debtors while most businesses can.
I'm not saying I agree with not legislating equal treatment, but the slippery slope is not inevitable.
Likewise, if you own a shop, you cannot refuse entry to your property based on race/ethnicity. You do not have an absolute right to do whatever you want with your property.
Property rights aren't absolute. They certainly don't trump civil rights, and anti-discrimination laws are amongst the core of our civil rights laws.
You do not have "the right" to choose to not rent your property to someone. If you think it's one of your rights, and you're in the property market, you should talk to a lawyer.
You're quite free to believe it's not racist, and that the sky is purple, but the law has different ideas and will act accordingly.
PS a little thought experiment: you're renting an appartment and two people show up - one white and one black, with similar income, jobs and credit history. You have to pick one, so how can you prove your decision was not racist?
Numerous laws will look at an action and your thoughts to decide what crime you were convicted of (e.g. murder vs manslaughter, theft, intent to commit $CRIME, etc.)
You have to pick one, so how can you prove your decision was not racist?
Cripes, simple examples like that aren't what anti-racism laws are for. It's when 10 black people turn up and the landlord tells them the apartment is gone, but it isn't.
You don't need to change their deep thinking, necessarily. Just their behaviour. That starts the social change.
Laws against (say) homosexual sex, or norms/laws/rules mentioning homosexuality in schools/TV kept many homosexuals in the closet, hidden and powerless. I hope we can do the same for racism.
But I think a part of it comes down to a higher chance of young people with Arab names either being students (short-term, prone to be loud and messy no matter where they're from) or more likely to bring in additional residents. And most landlord's I've known would prefer if nobody would live at all in the apartment at all...
I don't think 25-year old "Hanz" would be the prime candidate for successes, try faking a 40-something with a job for BMW/Siemens (directly, no freelance/contract) who only needs it to sleep during the weekdays and drives home to his Stuttgart home for the weekends.
Of which there is a lot, too, of course. This is Munich, which has a much sadder 9th of November than Berlin.
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 about it for a second.
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.
We (Nestoria.de) aggregate listings of most of the players in real estate in Germany (IS24, immowelt, immonet, süddeutsche, others) and offer an API. We also offer an API of price trends (ie what the avg rent is in an area and if it's going up or down).
In seriousness though, while we do try our best (not just in Germany, but eight other countries as well), the situation he describes is one that the internet doesn't do a good job of solving. Basically demand way outstrips supply in cities like Munich. As a result, if you have a good flat or house you want to rent out, really all you need to do is tell 5-10 people and via word of mouth you'll very quickly have more than enough high quality applicants. You really don't need online tools.
An interesting result is that we're now starting to see start-ups that reverse the model. In Köln/Düsseldorf there is https://salzundbrot.com (a Nestoria partner) who are free for owners/landlords, but charge applicants a small fee to make contact. Will be interesting to see if it catches on.
The reality though is there is just way more demand than supply. Normally that would be solved by price rises, but the rate of rent increases is reguated by law.
All that said, while I have sympathy with Munich renters, I now live in central London, where the problem is at another order of magnitude. As I always say "London isn't expensive, the rest of the world is cheap".
Of course I understand implementing something like this is quite complex, and you'd most likely have to precompute these things and limit it to a few common business centers as destinations, but it would be really preferable to my current strategy of "look for something that seems reasonably priced and then use another site to figure out if it falls within the 1hr commute window I'm looking for".
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 just isn't enough volume of people searching the way you describe to sustain them.
So it's not something we'll focus on. Sorry, I know that's probably a frustrating answer for you.
Good luck with your hunt.
And just to confirm the craziness the first apartment I checked out in Cologne [1] (for fun, not seriously planning to move atm) requires you to pay 1300 EUR for the kitchen (sure, makes sense), a bit of furniture (common) and - I wonder what they're smoking - the floor (Echtholzboden). You're "buying" the floor in a rented apartment? Look at the pictures. Are you going to take that with you when you move out?
Not sure if that's something you care about, but you mention that this site is a partner of yours. The UI's broken in my browser (Aurora/Firefox Nightly) - if you got contacts that might be something to look into? [2]
1: https://salzundbrot.com/suche/#!search={"f2":1000}&x=1&view=...
2: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1194203/SalzUndBrot.png
How do you compare to the more popular sites such as Zoopla?
It's really hard to build something simple, especially in more chaotic markets like India and Brazil.
re: Zoopla, they are one of our best partners. They are a great portal, we are a search engine. Complimentary tools for different tasks.
I have to say though, when you are a german couple, have a double income with no children/no pets, its not that hard to find something. I don't envy the rest though!
We've been doing it for many years and have tried many things, but if anyone has further suggestions always happy to learn.
In cities like Munich, speed is very important - is your search real-time or at least near rt? If so, I'd advertise that. I need to be sure I'm not missing any offerings, and that they aren't slower to show than when going to the 'real' site.
We do the best we can and push our partners to do the same. Over the years it is getting better, but it is not close to what consumers want.
That said, speed is a much bigger issue in some markets (rentals in cities like Munich) and much less in others (buying a house out in a village).
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...
"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?
Question: how does nestoria make money? Do you get some cut from immowelt etc. in case you end up renting/buying?
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, but I suspect often it is just that they never really adapted to the medium.
Many (most?) ads include a phone number. And I have had far better results by calling than by sending an e-mail. You should of course be one of the first people to call...
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 the e-mails, the response rate should have been lower.
So while I agree about that one flaw, I don't really think it affects the results that much.
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.
Reversing the problem is also a good idea, I know some people had success buying an ad in Sueddeutsche Zeitung. At one point I also put up printed ads in supermarkets in the areas I was considering and while the response rate was very low, I got at least some response.
There are also some agencies that in fact own flats and rent them without requiring the 2.5 x rent fee.
But once we decided it's okay for us to pay provision we got a nice new flat from a company within 2 month. The credit of the provision basically raises the rent for the first few years, but at least we didn't have to deal with landlords anymore. There were too much forms, credit checks and awkward talks.
It is very very difficult to deal with bad tenants. They exist, a lot of them. And it is very very difficult to know who is a bad tenant through these websites and Facebook groups. The problem here is an information problem. If these sites gave the person applying for a flat the chance to give information to prove they are good enough, that would be a blessing, both for (good) renters and for landlords.
I am not talking about financial information. I would be pretty happy with some references that would indicate the person is honest and serious and easy to deal with, even if they don't have much money; some access to Facebook profile and posts or other data available at the internet would do the job for me.
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.
Are you telling me that whole munich had arab tenants at least once in their past?
For example, why would anyone expect the same behaviour from a single black criminal drug-addict as from a married black lawyer with kids? The fact that they share the same skin-tone is the least important hint to their potential behaviour, and yet, historically, it's what people use because it's the first thing they see.
We're constantly looking at better ways to solve this problem and improve the tenant experience - and your post will prove an excellent bit of anecdotal insight for us. Our data is similar, showing even just a name can impact response rate!
To those suggesting all applicants should provide more data (facebook / linkedin / credit history), it's not always that simple. Still in the UK many renters don't have an online "presence". And whilst that may not be a problem for landlords with "hot" properties, putting off tenants for landlords with little demand is an absolute no go for us - sure, we want applicants to be of a high quality, but just because they don't have that information doesn't mean they aren't suitable.
We think allowing tenants to provide more information, whilst supporting all application levels is key - but making it clear that the more data you provide the higher your chances of success and a quick response (even if it's a simple no) isn't always easy.
We charge to advertise on external websites only (who charge us), to conduct referencing (because it costs us), and to set up tenancies (again, because it costs us) - rental transactions complete daily on our site completely for free.
Thank you for existing.
(Does it work great? Do you have a lot of paying customers?)
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?
It was clear to me that landlords had to pay a fee.
Depressing.
This seems to depend completely on whether the commission is paid by the owner or the tenant - the only time we had a "crowded" viewing (but still only about 5 other people) was for a flat where the commission was paid by the owner.
Another factor might have been that we were looking in the outskirts of Munich - if you think you absolutely need to live in Schwabing or Glockenbachviertel, it's your own damn fault.
I also turned to crawling. I regularly crawled IS24's furnished apartment section and put new entries into a Google Fusion Table. That way I could filter on fields and see the apartments on a map at the same time. This wasn't automated as much as the original poster's solution. But my main requirement was that the apartment be near a subway station of a line that stops at my place of work, which is not that easy to automate.
After about a week I found an apartment that was rented out by the owner directly (none of that agent fee nonsense). I was the first to contact the guy - a few minutes after it was posted. I had to decide if I take it the same day. Based only on pictures... It was a good deal. Colleagues of mine were paying MUCH MORE and got MUCH LESS.
We want to buy something in Munich and indeed, even if you are prepared to spend a million or more, it is extremely hard to get an invitation to visit a place (Even if you are in the right age and your wife is an italian girl, like mine).
It would be really cool to outwit the real estate dealers in the way you did it. I keep thinking. Ideas are welcome.
As far as I know this fee will soon have to be paid by the landlord rather than the potential tenant (by german law).
Indeed, there is a law in preparation, that you pay, if you contacted the agent to find a flat, but the owner pays, if he asked the agent to find a tenant.
I tell you what will happen: you'll never get a contract to rent a place, unless you sign that the agent worked for you, not for the owner.
Does anyone have first hand experience of that, or an explanation of why it is so?
It's an oil country. I'd not be surprised to find it's full of million-dollar apartments driving the average up. Maybe the low wage workers live beyond the city boundary, or in favelas that are excluded from the average.
http://www.architonic.com/ntsht/over-site-how-caracas-s-new-...
Just look at the numbers for Paris vs Munich. Paris is higher in everything but is ranked one behind Munich.
The world is better off for having them.
In essence, maven comes from Yiddish, and it means "one who accumulates knowledge". Economists spend a lot of time studying mavens and their habits.
Mavens are the people who will analyze every big screen TV on the market, pouring over data, correcting consumer report articles on minutia, and looking for the best deal. They're also the ones who analyze flight itineraries looking for the best combination of layovers and low fare, and they are the tiny fraction of people who actually read the prices on goods in a supermarket and will complain when the supermarket writes "special offer" on something without actually lowering the price, thus holding the market to account.
The interesting thing about mavens is that they not only pour over this data for their own purposes, but they actively share it with the world (even if 'world' only means 'other people they talk to directly') at large in order to help others, consciously or unconsciously.
The work of the few obsessors benefits everyone because markets don't "get away" with conning us.
I'd be curious to know where I stand..
Captcha is not really a problem if you are willing to spend a few cents.
Is living in 15 m² reasonable ?
I live in a studio of about 30 m² and I find it claustrophobic at times.
While I was looking here in Madrid, the least I could find were 20/25 m2 flats.
Regardless, as someone that has shared the author's pains multiple times, kudos to him for the creativity of his method.
I basically used it only for sleeping and being at the computer.
I was both working full-time and pursuing a degree (at least 4 hours of classes + 2-3 hs of study time), so I didn't have much in the way of free time to consider it claustrophobic :)