[HN Gopher] I need to find an apartment
___________________________________________________________________
I need to find an apartment
Author : mattrighetti
Score : 245 points
Date : 2022-04-09 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mattrighetti.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mattrighetti.com)
| sl3232323 wrote:
| Why don't you just ask someone if they have an apartment? We rely
| so much on technology, when we could just ask a friend. Currently
| living in Belize for $200 a month, beachfront propety.
| mreiner wrote:
| Interesting details brought up here about location specifics. At
| least in Zurich most ads contain an address. I fed it to google
| maps api to get the time by bike to my workplace which gave us
| some cheaper options we wouldn't have considered before. We also
| ended up taking/getting the one with the worst pictures. Imagine
| someone would scrape all platforms for your city of choice and
| aggregate those with some value added and maybe automatically
| apply with your personal documents to make sure your application
| gets in first even when you're busy, what would it be worth to
| you? Despite local differences it might still scale.
| 4midori wrote:
| It's sad that this process is so broken that it takes a skilled
| coder to roll their own, just to get good, organized information.
|
| We were promised jetpacks!
| ilovefood wrote:
| Ah... this brings back memories. A few years ago I wrote this
| article https://funnybretzel.com/datamining-a-flat-in-munich/
| when I was searching a flat in Munich. Some time has passed since
| then and meanwhile I've enhanced the process quite a lot, just
| like OP I'm currently searching for a place (a house) and I'm
| using quite the little bot farm to massively automate things.
| I'll post the results if it converges to something useful.
| Meanwhile, all the luck to OP and excellent write-up! :)
| [deleted]
| jean-malo wrote:
| In highly competitive markets the good apartments don't even make
| it to the websites that aggregate listings before someone takes
| them.
|
| The ones that do are either very expensive or will have 20+
| people showing up the next day (sometimes the same day) for a
| visit. It's crazy and while this article is very neat I'm not
| sure a bot that scrapes listing in batch is the answer.
| foobarian wrote:
| A long time ago I knew someone who's parents found them an
| excellent apartment at a great price in Boston. Great
| neighborhood, 2BR, nicely kept, off-street parking, you name
| it. Few years later they had to move since the owner was
| selling the place, and went on an apartment search by
| themselves (using an agency). Could not find anything anywhere
| near nice at that price point, and settled on something a lot
| more expensive.
|
| I decided that their parents must have tipped/bribed the
| original agent to get at that listing (since none of these ever
| made it to any search site, not that there were many at that
| time).
| Jeaye wrote:
| I did a similar thing to help me land an apartment 5 years ago,
| using Clojure: https://blog.jeaye.com/2017/02/28/clojure-
| apartments/
|
| However, my approach didn't include these map visuals; that's a
| great idea and a nice execution!
| dayvid wrote:
| If I have time, I always prefer to walk around the neighborhood I
| want to live in an see if there's signs or hear from people if a
| place is available informally. That's where you get the best
| deals.
|
| If you find the seller, you usually get a better deal. If the
| seller finds you, ...
| asiachick wrote:
| I wish all apartment listing included a floor plan. I could
| easily reject 90% of apartments without having to go personally
| look at it if they's show me a floor plan. It's a little
| surprising to me they aren't more common.
|
| In Japan they're often missing other things like lots of pictures
| but at least the number 1 requirement to list an apartment is a
| floor plan.
|
| https://suumo.jp/jj/chintai/ichiran/FR301FC001/?ar=030&bs=04...
|
| I wish Craigslist would require one or somehow strongly suggest
| that the person offering the apartment would get better matches
| and have less of their own time wasted if they'd add a floor
| plan.
|
| I also wish they'd add some examples of good and bad pictures. So
| many people take pictures with their phone and the field of view
| is so small and lighting so bad the pictures are basically
| useless. I'm not saying they need pro-equipment but my guess is
| there are at least some guidelines that would be helpful. How
| about no portrait mode pics as just one example that would likely
| lead to more useful images.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Why not downloading the html page and scrape that file instead of
| using puppeteer (which uses a headless chrome I think) ?
| mattrighetti wrote:
| I didn't have an easy solution to grab that JSON variable
| directly by scraping HTML. So I chose Puppeteer because it
| simulates the browser (yes, chrome) and therefore I could just
| get the JSON object with a bunch of lines as if I was using the
| browser's console. It's slow, but I think it's the most
| straightforward way to do it. But if you could elaborate more
| on your approach I will definitely try that out!
| grose wrote:
| I had a similar problem that I solved with goquery and otto.
| You can use goquery to traverse the DOM and otto to execute
| the script fragment. Then just grab the data from otto's VM.
|
| Your scraping being slow and using Chrome might be a blessing
| in disguise though. If you aren't careful you can get
| detected as a bot and banned from the site.
|
| https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery
| https://github.com/robertkrimen/otto
| binarymax wrote:
| I love blogs like this. Showing the dirty side of data
| acquisition with an end result of useable software, that hacks
| around provider limitations to give something way better. We'll
| done.
| Victerius wrote:
| Cheap. Spacious. In a desirable zip code. Pick two.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| > TL;DR: I hate apartment hunting, I've tried to make it as
| interesting as possible by creating a pipeline with different
| tools and languages to scrape data.....
|
| Grow up, learn to take on boring tasks without playing with toys
| mihaaly wrote:
| "creating a pipeline with different tools and languages to scrape
| data from a website with the use of Puppeteer, load data into a
| SQLite database using Go and visualizing all the data with Python
| and Folium."
|
| So much sophistication based on at least partly incomplete,
| filtered/distorted, and inaccurate data. So much important
| aspects that cannot be in an ad or intentionally left out and can
| only be extracted by painstaking efforts. Even the initial
| filtering out could be unreliable then.
| madrox wrote:
| I did something similar 10 years ago during my move to SF. I
| needed to find an apartment within two weeks, so I built a
| crawler to do complex filtering and notify me immediately.
|
| In my case, the tool was ultimately useless because I discovered
| the way SF housing worked for nice apartments was 1) Openings are
| posted on Friday 2) Saturday, open house collects applications 3)
| Deal is signed on Sunday and post taken down. Anything my crawler
| picked up was stuff that was overpriced or in bad condition. For
| all my sophistication, the dataset was just the bad stuff.
|
| Apartment hunting is a great example of needing to know the
| underlying behaviors of your dataset before you use it to make
| decisions.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| At least OP had the full address of those apartment on that
| website, so he could plot them on the map.
|
| Here in Austria, most leeches, sorry, realtors, avoid putting the
| street in the ad to prevent you from trying to contact the
| property directly and bypassing their fees, so apartment hunting
| is even more of a headache.
|
| Still, amazing work from OP.
| tecleandor wrote:
| Oh, around here (Spain) usually they don't put the address in
| the ad so you can't cross check the information with the
| national registry and find that the apartment is 20% smaller
| than claimed.
| est31 wrote:
| When I searched for my apartment, I was able to reverse
| engineer the home's address sometimes when the general vicinity
| was specified, then looking at the pictures, and comparing them
| with Google street view. This was a manual process however and
| only worked if enough outside views were available. Despite the
| time effort, you still spent less time on it per house than
| making an appointment for a viewing, getting there, and looking
| at it. If Google allows you to download the street views for an
| entire city, one might build an ML solution to bring up
| candidates at least.
|
| Similarly, in the city where I studied for university, I
| immediately knew where the house was located just from outside
| pictures of it in the ad, at least for the districts of the
| city I was familiar with.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| I use a similar process to look at interesting job listings
| sent to me unsolicited by recruiters. You can anonymize the
| company but it only takes a few unique phrases to locate the
| posting with Google.
| dazbradbury wrote:
| There are genuine privacy concerns at play here, for example
| there may be existing tenants/owners who don't want people
| randomly knocking on the door because someone saw an ad online.
| Or getting a bunch of junk mail because there is an extra data
| point about the property.
|
| I guess the variety of concerns will vary from country to
| country depending on local laws / existing open data though.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I don't think it is reasonable to expect to be able to list
| real estate for rent or sale, and also expect privacy with
| regards to the address.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Yeah but this is a "the customer isn't the user" situation.
| The _tenant_ wants and deserves privacy, and it 's their
| privacy that can be compromised by the listing.
|
| The owner doesn't really have a reason to care, I don't
| think, and may even be incentivized in some situations to
| reveal information the tenants would rather they not.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| What information? "This apartment exists at LOCATION and
| will be available for rent at DATE?" And you think the
| tenant is entitled to stop the world from knowing that
| because the tenant is residing at that location before
| DATE?
|
| Goodness. I should give the First Amendment a hug.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| 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 place they are free to refuse, or ignore the
| doorbell or anything else. Of course they have a freedom
| against being harassed, so if people persist they can get
| police involved. That seems like a separate issue to me
| from having their address posted online in a rental
| listing.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> 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 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.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| The tenant has the right to refuse to have the home shown
| when they are moving out and the landlord is trying to
| find new tenants? How about maintenance workers fixing
| appliances or something? That seems pretty hard to
| believe.
|
| Are you sure the tenant isn't just allowed to refuse "a
| time slot" but also must offer alternatives?
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Yes tenants have to approve those visits, hence its good
| when both parties have good relationship. Renters tend to
| have strong protections in Europe.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Outside of necessary repairs or maintenance, you can
| legally refuse unwanted visits from the landlord to the
| apartment you are paying rent for.
|
| Story time: A couple of years ago, I was looking to buy
| an apartment and saw one spacious apartment centrally
| located that was way below market price but had no
| pictures in the ad. I called the agent and asked when can
| I visit as soon as possible since there's no pictures.
| Agent said the old lady currently renting it does not
| allow visitors inside, that's why there's no pictures. I
| asked how in the world can you buy an apartment without
| seeing it? Agent said that's why the owner is selling it
| below market price. And the charry on top, if you do buy
| it, you'll be forced by law to keep the current tenant
| who's paying frozen rent, not adjusted for the past 20
| years, until she either decides to levees voluntarily or
| dies. That's why the owner had to sell below market.
| denysvitali wrote:
| Interesting article: I did something similar but for Zurich
| (finding a low-price, but good apartment there is almost
| impossible).
|
| I did follow a different approach though, and reverse engineered
| the APIs of the most common rental listing websites here.
|
| I didn't publish the code (or better said, I didn't make it
| public), but it's similar to yours. Instead of SQLite I used a
| PostGis database where I stored the apartments with their point
| to point public transport distance from my office (pre-covid
| search). I did it in Rust.
|
| Whilst the application is not available to the public (yet), all
| of the libraries I've created are now available.
|
| I should have both a Rust and a Golang version for most / all of
| them.
|
| On a side note, I did a similar project (scraper + visualizer /
| search) for finding a job for my girlfriend by scraping LinkedIn,
| Xing and a couple of other local job posting websites.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/denysvitali/sbb-api-rs
|
| [1]: https://github.com/denysvitali/homegate-rs
|
| [2]: https://github.com/denysvitali/flatfox-rs
|
| [3]: https://github.com/denysvitali/go-sbb-api
| vageli wrote:
| > I didn't publish the code (or better said, I didn't make it
| public), but it's similar to yours. Instead of SQLite I used a
| PostGis database where I stored the apartments with their point
| to point public transport distance from my office (pre-covid
| search). I did it in Rust.
|
| How did you convert an address to long/lat for postgis?
| megous wrote:
| Some countries publish all addresses with geolocation
| information as part of open data initiatives.
| denysvitali wrote:
| I was lucky, the data also included lat/lng and the address
| for most (if not all) the entries.
|
| If I would have been confronted with such a situation though,
| I would have probably used some Geocoding API like Google
| Maps's geocoding [0] or OSM's Nominatim [1].
|
| [0]: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocodi
| ng/o...
|
| [1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim
| mattrighetti wrote:
| You could use nominatim [0]
|
| [0]: https://nominatim.org
| bogomipz wrote:
| Interesting. I am curious how did the ultimately play you for
| you? I'd be curious to hear the outcome. Thanks for the links.
| pimlottc wrote:
| 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 web to compare
| prices and hunt down things you were interested in. But user-
| centric fantasies like this don't make fortunes, so walled
| gardens is what we ended up with.
| barnabee wrote:
| This is why companies must be forced to make their data
| available. The value that could be unleashed is insane.
| judge2020 wrote:
| athome.lu is specifically selling the 'search all listings'
| functionality, though. If they had to make this data
| available they wouldn't be interested in making the data in
| the first place, since it'd basically be charity work for
| whoever else is interested in throwing that data into
| elasticsearch and creating a frontend for it whilst
| undercutting athome.
| golergka wrote:
| How would bankrupting these companies would unleash value,
| exactly?
| Gigachad wrote:
| How is mandatory data reporting linked to bankruptcy? The
| more information available to the market, the better and
| more efficient they run.
| abhaynayar wrote:
| I'm looking for an apartment in Bangalore right now, and hope to
| be done with it soon.
| bilekas wrote:
| Ciao, I had the same problem moving to Italy, specifically
| Bologna.. Super student rich town so apartments are gone fast, I
| setup a crawler of the usual sites but one or two had live
| updates for locations that would be published through their
| site's websocket, after a few hours I had the rasPi subscribed
| and could get notifications to me as soon as they were available,
| bypassing the need to sit on the website.
|
| It was a pain after for bureaucracy but that was after landing an
| apartment.
| spike021 wrote:
| About ten years ago I was attending San Jose State University and
| really needed to find a 1 bedroom apartment at a decent price
| (lol) in the downtown SJ area since I would no longer be living
| in the dorms.
|
| I tried a few different ways of finding an apartment, but in the
| end it was one case where the old phrase "it's not what you know,
| it's who you know" worked in my favor.
|
| During my freshman year I had found and been working a job on
| campus in one of the department offices (side note: if you're a
| student, you're best off trying to find a student assistant
| opening in a department office; at least at SJSU, most paid above
| minimum wage, were pretty lax and could be used for some study
| time, and you have so many opportunities to make connections with
| professionals).
|
| One of my coworkers there had a family and they were living in
| one of these small ~8 unit apartment buildings downtown. It was a
| privately-owned building, not one of these newer, fancy
| conglomerate ones.
|
| She connected me with the management/owner and long story short,
| I got a decently livable place with rent control for about 1/3 of
| market rate due to being a lower income student and taking a unit
| that wasn't recently refurbished (old carpet, old paint, etc.).
| haswell wrote:
| I'm in the middle of an apartment search. I was reflecting the
| other day on how much searching for an apartment has changed over
| the last 10 years.
|
| Conclusion: it hasn't changed much at all.
|
| It's still necessary to search on a myriad of sites. Most of the
| time, by the time you inquire, a place is gone. Or the ad was
| misleading and that "$2000 2BR" is actually "$2000 for the
| cheapest Studio we have, but we also have 2BR for $3.5K".
|
| Finding places that match my criteria still requires careful
| inspection of the description. Checking a filter box for
| "Parking" excludes places that only mention parking in the
| description.
|
| With all of the modernization and streamlining that has happened
| in other parts of our lives, apartment hunting remains
| unstructured, messy, frustrating, stressful.
|
| Aggregators like Padmapper helped for awhile, but these days, it
| seems like most listings are posted by scammy middlemen just
| trying to make a commission on the listing, and now the site
| actively makes the process even harder.
|
| Is hunting for an apartment doomed to be this messy forever? It
| seems like an area that is ripe for disruption or a better
| option, but what would it take to actually solve this?
|
| ---
|
| With all of that said, this post is exactly what I needed right
| now. I've been toying with a very similar idea to improve the
| efficiency of my search process and this is good inspiration.
| bee_rider wrote:
| "We have apartments which are inexpensive, spacious, and in a
| nice location"
|
| "Hooray, sounds great!"
|
| "Ok, which element of that list would you like?"
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| In San Francisco, when I was looking for an apartment,, I
| always ended up with an apartment with the worst pictures /
| missing things in the description on Craigslist, because they
| had less interest / were cheaper.
|
| The market for rentals is never efficient and will never be!
| People who post to Zillow with a perfect description know they
| can extract more money for it.
| Cerium wrote:
| The worse the advertisement the better. I lived in an
| absolutely lovely townhouse which had no pictures posted and
| a description which failed to mention any of the amenities.
| My current house was shown with no staging and blackout
| curtains. They only got 3 offers in 2 weeks, in a market
| where most listings get t 30 offers in a week. It pays to
| look seriously when doing so takes more effort.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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 with potential buyers/renters so you're less likely
| to luck into something that others just haven't found yet.
| (The funny thing is that the house I ended up buying turned
| out be being sold by someone I knew quite well at work.)
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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 thing, but nowhere near as big a force as it is now.
| ghaff wrote:
| When I saw the house I eventually bought, I had seen one
| property I was interested in but was on the fence about.
| When I saw this one I was pretty much sold. Great
| property. The house was old and very little had obviously
| been done with it for decades. And there were some things
| (like on the small side and one bathroom) that would
| probably have been showstoppers for a lot of people but
| weren't an issue for me.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| distrill wrote:
| i don't share this experience at all. i've used zillow and
| apartments.com recently (found a place through apartments.com
| about a year ago and just found one through zillow a few weeks
| ago) and had no issues. the filter options work how you'd
| expect, and i wasn't put in touch with any middle men - it was
| either the private property owner or the apartment management
| company who handled the leasing directly.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I had pretty good luck with Zillow and Craigslist all the
| times I've tried
|
| There were a few outright lying apartment management
| companies, but I managed to look at some nice places being
| rented out directly by their owners and settled on a good one
| brandall10 wrote:
| Had an excellent experience finding my last two places from
| Zillow - one in SD and one in Denver. Truly wonderfully
| luxury 1 beds at below market prices from landlords who had
| this as their only secondary property.
|
| Tried the same thing with NYC and things went nowhere fast.
| mosseater wrote:
| I used to work at a startup that aggregated apartment listings.
| Long gone now, we couldn't compete with Zillow or
| Apartments.com. But what we were doing is just aggregating all
| of the rental websites we could possibly scrape into one
| interface.
|
| It was hard. There are so many scams out there. If you are not
| hand curating listings, you have to rely on somewhat novel
| approaches to filter out all the bad data. For example, any
| mention of 'Jesus' or 'God' automatically blocked the listing.
| Sure there might have been legitamate listings, but anytime I
| would go in and check 99% of the time it was a scam. You also
| have scams of people listing units they don't own or have any
| relation too. They ask for a security deposit up front and just
| pocket it, leaving the new tenant to have an awkward
| conversation with the real resident.
|
| Data is often unformatted too. Scraping out bedrooms and
| bathrooms can even be a challenge on websites like craigslist
| where the listing is just one big paragraph. (Not anymore,
| craigslist has come a long way, but that's how it was 10 years
| ago). Often times you had to just search for the closest number
| around the word "bed" or "bath". Don't even think about getting
| features like "driveway" or "laundry" out of them.
|
| In the end, we ended up utilizing some pretty intense ETL
| pipelines to collate historical data, census information,
| property assessment data, and other things to try to get a more
| accurate picture on our listings.
|
| But that didn't win out. What won out are the sites like
| Apartments.com or Zillow, where legitimate property owners can
| post their listings in a formatted searchable way. We could
| scrape them and post the same listings on our site, but at that
| point we were just pushing our customers to another platform
| that honestly worked better than our own.
|
| We couldn't have the most up to date data, that was determined
| by how fast we could go back to scrape a listing. And often
| times we were knee deep in a battle to avoid being blocked by
| these companies. Often times, after we had exhausted our
| proxies, the only thing left to use was Tor.
| sjf wrote:
| You didn't even mention all the straight scam advertisements
| you have to wade through. Next time I move I am going to hire a
| PA to handle searching and making viewing appointments.
| trinovantes wrote:
| Asymmetric information works in favor of the landlord so I
| doubt it'll ever get better barring some legislation -- which
| we know will also never happen because most voters and
| politicians are also landlords
| prpl wrote:
| > a myriad of sites
|
| aka it is decentralized
| Etheryte wrote:
| As someone who just jumped through all the hoops to find a new
| apartment, the pain is real. I think the main issue is that the
| incentives are misaligned from the perspective of the seeker.
| Where I'm currently at (the Netherlands), the market is
| dominated by agents. Using an agent makes sense from the
| perspective of the apartment owner -- they will take care of
| managing the ads, initial screening, arranging viewings etc.
| Given how many people contact a single viewing, you definitely
| don't want them hitting your personal inbox or phone.
|
| From the agent's perspective, it's good to drive people to
| their company's website rather than one of the big aggregate
| ones. Having more people visit it means they're more likely to
| do business with that company specifically. Getting people to
| visit your company's site is pretty straightforward: they put
| up ads there earlier, often so much earlier that by the time
| you see an ad on an aggregate site, it's already fully booked
| for viewings.
|
| And that's how we end up with dozens of different company
| sites, each crappy in their own way, and in the middle of it
| all, people trying to find a home pulling their hair out,
| refreshing a bunch of different websites every few hours.
| amelius wrote:
| The question, though, is: why doesn't this converge to a
| single monopolist agency, like in the rest of capitalism?
| scythe wrote:
| Guess who spends the most money on lobbying?
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/257344/top-lobbying-
| spen...
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Love the dark pattern on that site's cookie popup. How
| annoying!
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Because it's a mostly unregulated market. A new competitor
| has minimal government regulations to satisfy in order to
| start and everyone and their dog can start doing this job
| (and believe me, I've met some interesting agents when
| looking for the best deals both looking for rent and
| renting out my property). The big centralised agencies
| don't really have a way to stop smaller agents offering
| cheaper services and serving different markets (even if
| they're just different neighbourhoods) is hard.
|
| This is how capitalism works when there is no government
| helping monopolies to form in the name of security /
| justice / anti-money laundering / insert-politician-
| buzzword-of-the-day.
| ncmncm wrote:
| This does not explain anything.
|
| The natural end condition of an unregulated market is a
| monopoly. That is why we need regulation.
|
| So, something is operating to provide implicit
| regulation. In this case it seems like chaos serves that
| role. Monopoly relies on a self-ordering property common
| to most market conditions.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| bubblethink wrote:
| Because the duration is too long (a year) and the cost is
| significant for all parties to let a middleman take a huge
| cut of this pie. For shorter duration stays, we already
| have the consolidation around airbnb.
| colinhb wrote:
| In my experience in NL makelaars (brokers) serve particular
| niches, and I expect they can outcompete larger firms that
| don't understand the neighborhood or municipal market as
| well, the market segment (roughly price), the kind of
| buyer/renter, the kind of seller/leaser, not to mention
| just their access to "deal flow" in their networks
| unrelated to their expertise.
|
| Think it's all related apartments and houses not really
| being fungible.
|
| ESIT: Also, more directly to GP's experience, when I was in
| the market in NL I found the biggest aggregator to be very
| useful, which is apparently different from their
| experience: funda.nl
| monkeybutton wrote:
| >Given how many people contact a single viewing, you
| definitely don't want them hitting your personal inbox or
| phone.
|
| This is something I noticed last time I was apartment hunting
| in Montreal. You'd see a sign or listing, call, and the
| number would be out of service. As if landlords were using
| virtual numbers/call forwarding services and just shutting it
| off once the unit was rented.
| dvtrn wrote:
| I might test this one day just to verify it did start with
| zillow, but after an interesting set of experiences*
| calling phone numbers for rentals on Zillow I started
| getting some very odd text messages about bank accounts I
| don't own and suspicious activity.
|
| I don't call phone numbers on listing sites anymore, even
| if there's a face and an agency next to it. Better off
| looking up the agency, going to their website an calling
| that number (which in all three cases of the above, were
| different than the one on Zillow).
|
| ---
|
| * by "interesting set of experiences" I mean calling the
| number on a listing took me to an automated menu and a
| robotic voice where I had to enter the street number, and
| then first five letters of a street name so it could "look
| up" the property I was inquiring about, and connect me to
| the right seller.
|
| Hanging up on that nonsense immediately and calling the
| leasing agency's number via their website got me a human
| being in two rings, and the leasing agent for the unit I
| was interested in after about 45 seconds of hold music.
| tromp wrote:
| Housing website https://funda.nl is pretty dominant in the
| Netherlands. Why would you need to search many agent's
| websites when nearly all inventory shows up on funda.nl ?
|
| I find it much preferable to North American sites like
| https://realtor.ca that think that number of baths is more
| important than floorspace (which to my utter amazement is
| often not even available).
| brightball wrote:
| That has always shocked me as well.
|
| Even houses can be difficult in many cases.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| +1 to https://funda.nl. In fact as a new immigrant I bought
| house completely through funda. They have nice tie-ups with
| all the regulatory/certificate providers such as
| construction report etc., Fantastic experience overall.
|
| Selling though is a completely different story it's almost
| impossible without an agent. And they do provide a valuable
| service; like photo session, publishing on funda and
| others, taking care of house-viewing etc.,
| Etheryte wrote:
| You're right in that most listings eventually end up on
| sites such as Funda, Pararius etc. However, almost all
| offers go online on an agent website first, oftentimes
| considerably so. Your milage will vary of course,
| personally I started using agent sites after calling an ad
| that had been up on Pararius for 5 minutes yielded the
| response that the viewing list is already full. Turned out
| it had already been up on the agent page for a day and
| well-priced offers go fast in desirable areas. It is worth
| noting that I live in a very contested area, I would hope
| life is better in smaller places.
| [deleted]
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > From the agent's perspective, it's good to drive people to
| their company's website rather than one of the big aggregate
| ones
|
| This is strange, wasn't my experience at all. Just about
| every house I viewed through funda was advertised by agents.
| And when I put up my house for sale the first thing the agent
| did was to publish on funda. All the agents care about is
| selling a house they get a hefty sum (0.3% if I remember
| correctly) and are totally fine advertising on funda.
|
| As a house seeker I dealt with a bunch of agents and the
| experience wasn't all that bad to be honest. Mind you all
| this was in early 2019; from what I hear late 2020 onwards
| the market has gone bananas in the Netherlands and Amsterdam
| in particular.
| unilynx wrote:
| Having just (almost) sold a house in NL, the agent
| explained that the ordering currently was:
|
| - paid searches (even at other agents)
|
| - unpaid searches at their own agency
|
| - social media
|
| - agency website
|
| - funda
|
| each step would be on the next day, so if you're only
| watching funda, you're already four days behind
| timr wrote:
| > Is hunting for an apartment doomed to be this messy forever?
| It seems like an area that is ripe for disruption or a better
| option, but what would it take to actually solve this?
|
| I hesitate to say it, but there is already a solution to this,
| and it has been the one that New York has had for years: you
| hire an agent. A good agent will sort through all of that for
| you, and streamline the process to the point where you can go
| from search to signing in under a week (if not quicker). Of
| course, there's the problem of _bad_ agents, but that 's true
| of anything. As you note, online services are often bad, as
| well.
|
| In other words, I don't see this as a problem without a
| solution; I see it as a problem without a _software automated_
| solution, which is true for a lot of problems in life,
| particularly ones that involve huge numbers of messy,
| opinionated people with different motivations and interests.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| In other countries, not in the USA, I've never once had a
| good experience with renting via an agent.
|
| It seems it's in their job description to try to convince me
| to pay more for less. They listen carefully to my
| requirements and then take me to places that don't match at
| all.
|
| I guess they figure since I've taken my entire afternoon with
| them, and since they've been friendly, I might give up on
| what I'm looking for and rent whatever it is they decided to
| shill that day.
|
| Of all the countries I've rented in and had occasion to
| interact with agents, ones in Turkey behaved the most like
| cartoon caricatures: they use every sitcom used car salesman
| trick in the book. It would be funny to watch, except that
| they're perpetually wasting their time and mine.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| This doesn't work in all US markets unfortunately, as I
| discovered recently when considering that very option you
| suggest. In some slower towns a few agents are willing to do
| this on the side as a source of income, but then in places
| like SF the home buying market is so hot, that it's
| comparatively bad ROI for agents to spend any time on most
| rentals. I'm curious how NYC manages to pull that off.
| nradov wrote:
| There are a _lot_ of licensed real estate agents in the SF
| Bay Area. Very few of them get the lucrative sales
| listings. There are plenty of extra agents with time to
| work for renters if they wanted to. But most renters don 't
| seem to want that service, and most lessors aren't
| accustomed to working with agents.
| timr wrote:
| A lot of NYC agents also do this to supplement income. Real
| estate is feast-or-famine, and especially during the slower
| sales markets you can find that agents are highly
| incentivized to do a good job. But yeah, you're going to
| take a back-seat to the purchase transaction in a hot
| market, unless you make it worth their while on a dollar-
| per-hour basis. That's the downside of using a "regular"
| real estate agent.
|
| In NYC specifically, there are agencies that make most of
| their business from renter-side representation. You can
| find the good ones easily on the usual review sites.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| NYC has a broker's fee to pay for rentals. The typical rate
| is somewhere between a month's rent and 15% of annual rent.
| It's quite expensive.
| timr wrote:
| This isn't strictly true. Historically many do, but
| increasingly many don't. It's been changing. Whether you
| pay for your own representation is also an entirely
| separate question.
|
| As someone else in this thread noted, the landlord often
| hires an agent because they don't want to deal with the
| tidal wave of crap that comes from dealing with
| applicants. That person gets paid, obviously, and the
| _landlord_ isn 't the one paying them. That's the rate
| you're talking about here. These people are not
| incentivized to provide good service to the renter, and
| typically don't. They suck.
|
| Higher-end buildings often have in-house agents (again:
| you're paying for this, whether you realize it or not),
| and these are called "no fee" buildings. But an
| increasing number of places don't have either, and just
| provide access to professional renter's agents instead of
| listing publicly. Or they _do_ list publicly, and barely
| respond to the tidal wave of yahoos, knowing that
| motivated renters hire an agent. YMMV.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| What kind of agent? Just a. real estate agent?
| klodolph wrote:
| An apartment broker.
|
| Just like when buying a house, an apartment broker works on
| behalf of the landlord or the tenant. They charge a fee
| which is a percentage of a year's rent. It is negotiable.
| timr wrote:
| Essentially. In NYC, many real estate agents will represent
| the renter for a service fee, just like they represent the
| buyer in a purchase transaction. It supplements the income
| that comes from the higher-value (but much less regular)
| money that they get from sales.
|
| There are agencies that make most of their business in this
| area, and generally have better rate structures (typically
| a month or two of rent, flat rate). Others want to charge
| you on a percentage basis, which you can negotiate, and
| obviously changes the incentive structure. All of these are
| "expensive" (relative to free), but worth it depending on
| how you value your time.
|
| Other people are (rightly) noting that there is risk of
| getting a scammy real estate agent, but that's true of any
| service. You have to look at reviews and trust your gut.
| Good real estate agents are motivated to do the right thing
| for you, because they see it as a marketing channel into
| larger sales in the future. Bad real estate agents are in
| it only for the immediate cash. These people behave in such
| obviously different ways that they're pretty easy to
| discriminate, in practice.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| If the agent is in any way getting compensated when you
| sign a lease, or as a percentage of the rent, or anything
| like that, they are not working for you.
|
| The only way they might be working for you is if you are
| paying them an hourly rate or per showing or something
| like that.
| kortilla wrote:
| That solution is bad. You have no idea what you're missing
| out on by using an agent. You might think you had a good
| agent, but unless you're already really familiar with the
| market, you could have missed out on significantly better
| matches and you wouldn't even know.
|
| You know how we know this is a solvable problem? Listings for
| places to buy don't have nearly as many problems.
| timr wrote:
| Like I said, there are bad agents. There are also bad
| plumbers. There are bad doctors. There are bad
| housekeepers. This is not a problem unique to real estate,
| and tools exist to help you find reliable service
| professionals.
|
| > You know how we know this is a solvable problem? Listings
| for places to buy don't have nearly as many problems.
|
| Just as OP said, there are tons of sites out there that
| claim to "solve" this, but don't. So no, I don't know that
| this is a computer-solvable problem.
| kurthr wrote:
| In really competitive markets it seems like you either get
| lucky, or you basically know someone in the area who can hook
| you by word-of-mouth.
|
| In the ancient "before times" there were also actual rental
| agencies where a human would look for an appropriate apartment
| for you. I didn't know about them, but a local NorCal person
| turned me on and it was the only way to find things. They
| followed all of the different local listings daily and knew the
| area fairly well (e.g. how parking, transport, different
| commutes would be). It was $25/mo and ~$100/yr for them to go
| through the listings call the renter, if necessary. They
| usually also collected $100 fee, if they hooked you up (though
| I'm sure you could work around it) with one of their (usually
| several times a week email of 5-10) available recommendations
| and usually a $50+ fee for running a "credit check". The reason
| it seemed to work was that the renters trusted the rental
| agency to only send them real referrals, and the agency knew
| all about scammers and fake listings, and daily follow-up. It
| only worked due to the relatively small area and and high
| volume. Each agent was looking for ~50-100 people during a
| month and making several $k/mo themselves, filling them
| typically in a few months.
|
| Like travel agents used to be an actual thing... but now you
| either do it yourself on-line, or you're going on some giant
| family cruise thing.
| anoplus wrote:
| > With all of the modernization and streamlining that has
| happened in other parts of our lives, apartment hunting remains
| unstructured, messy, frustrating, stressful.
|
| If multiple candidates compete over the same apt, no searching
| method in the world will resolve the issue. Either you have
| high supply of apts, or a super intelligent city software that
| matches people to available apartments based on their
| socioeconomic and professional profiles.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Where I live (Baltimore) a fair amount of the rental market
| still works by calling a number on a for rent sign in a window
| vmception wrote:
| > Aggregators like Padmapper helped for awhile
|
| Everyone that attempts to address the housing market just winds
| up realizing how lucrative it is to not fix it
|
| Once they get a little data and hire some agents its just a
| reversion to the mean
| lupire wrote:
| How is it lucrative?
|
| Would a pad mapper intentionally make some listings bad in
| order to reduce effective supply?
| vmception wrote:
| The better or best example is Compass really
| hattmall wrote:
| Because you can use your position to promote expensive
| listings with more profit. A truly functional aggregator
| would lower prices by creating efficiencies. It's more
| profitable to let the market utilize price discrimination
| as long as the favor is to the supply side. If there is an
| oversupply then the aggregator would work to raise prices
| and would be more profitable. Right now the most profitable
| renter favoring model would be an aggregator that charges
| renters a fee. The problem is the same people don't rent
| frequently enough so customer acquisition costs would
| likely be too high.
| kebman wrote:
| I think it depends on a few factors. The culture where you're
| searching. The laws. And the economy. And the available
| services. Where I'm from the law works pretty well, and there's
| really only one de-facto site that most people use for selling
| their pad, though Facebook has tried to take over some of the
| competition. I don't think you can get away from the stress of
| viewings, but IMHO it sounds like it's a lot more difficult to
| search where you're situated.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| If you are in a hard market (SF) I would highly recommend
| stalking. Get a list of buildings you truly like. In SF I had
| like 10 I would kill to get into. When your about 1-2 months
| from your lease expiring, start stalking hard: call the
| managers, talk to people walking into the building, talk to the
| mail man - anything. Nice SF places _rarely_ have openings.
| "Oh Mrs. Baskin passed away - we have will have a new listing
| in about a month". On it, I have my cashiers check, no site
| needed, my credit report printed, 4 references in hand, I even
| help the apartment manager carry in her groceries - and I don't
| mind hearing her stories. There are also a few families that
| own 20 or so buildings - once you get on their "good list" -
| you are in.
|
| The places you get are amazing. Clear views of the SF harbor,
| tucked away in PacHeights, full parking, cheaper rent etc.
| After doing this for 15 years I knew all the managers of those
| 10 buildings by name. My friends that "wing it" get sooo
| screwed. They go through listings, trying to piece if it is a
| nice place, always getting their initial deposit stolen,
| application fees swiped, going to open apartments 20 people
| deep, dealing with large corporate landlords, on and on. Make
| friends!
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Sounds like you should become an agent.
| zoover2020 wrote:
| Moien! Great article.
|
| Something tells me you're joining a big online book store ;-).
|
| Tell me when you're in town for a beer, would love to hear how
| this unfolds.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Renting is fundamentally broken.
|
| You submit precious personal info over to a random stranger along
| with payment to check your credit. Last time I checked, this fee
| is $25-50 USD. You've now given them enough information to steal
| your identity. You also may need to do this multiple times if
| you're rejected. The person receiving this information rarely has
| identity protection measures in place and you receive no
| guarantees that they've destroyed this information.
|
| A much better solution would be to develop an escrow service
| which acts as a middleman between renters and landlords. Aspiring
| renters could sign up with the escrow and submit their
| information once. Their one-time fee would cover a fixed number
| of queries by potential landlords. The queries could include such
| information as income validation, criminal history, job history,
| rental history, etc. But these queries could be approved by the
| renter in advance. This sort of query process allows the renter
| to control the types of information given out. The queries could
| be structured to allow pass/fail results only, so that landlords
| do not receive intimate details but only know whether or not a
| renter is acceptable based on their criteria.
|
| Once you have a system like that, you can open it up to all sorts
| of validation queries. Think of it as a general personal
| information escrow service.
|
| This idea has been bouncing around in my head for over a decade
| now but I'm more of a low-level systems engineer so I never got
| around to trying to implement it. Seems like a decent startup
| idea though.
| turtlebits wrote:
| A service similar to what you're proposing called Smartmove
| already exists. The renter pays them for the application +
| credit/background/etc checks. You don't have to handle payment
| or take SSNs. Unfortunately pass/fail doesn't work due to
| nuance in income/credit/rental history.
| [deleted]
| de-asis-kevin wrote:
| How many major cities in the world do we have right now where
| prices of rent did not go up?
|
| I'm really curious to know the breakdown of home/building
| ownership in the world, and how much the person makes in that
| city. Curious how much property is owned by individuals vs
| companies.
| wildmanx wrote:
| Looks to me like procrastination from doing what he _actually_
| needs to do. Which is to click on those links to find an
| apartment. Tech won 't solve that.
|
| Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/974/
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| I'd call it more of a variant of the XY problem:
| https://xyproblem.info/
| mattrighetti wrote:
| I partially agree! But atm I'm using the tool a lot, it's
| working well and as expected. Let's say that for the time it
| took me to develop it was definitely worth it
| wildmanx wrote:
| Good for you! Glad you had some fun.
|
| And you are in the beginning of your career, can just as well
| post it to make yourself attractive for future employers.
| Better solve an actual problem that you had than to post some
| made-up nonsense-projects on Github just because people think
| you gotta have "a Github" when applying somewhere.
| sofixa wrote:
| This reminds me of the small Go utility i wrote to help when i
| was in a similar situation. My focus was entirely on checking the
| location though, and see how much time it'd take to get to my
| various points of interest ( work addresses, places where things
| happen, favourite restaurants and bars, etc.). (It was just one
| of the things we were looking at with my SO, but it was a
| factor).
|
| It's all Google Maps with arguments so i should probably open
| source it, someone might find it useful.
| vageli wrote:
| This is a great project and reminds me of a small project I put
| together when searching for an off-grid property. Price, property
| size, and distance to home were key constraints and using
| something like follium would have made it much nicer than the
| tabular format I used. Thanks for sharing!
| aqme28 wrote:
| I'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! "
| pacetherace wrote:
| 1:1200 is probably worse than most selective universities.
|
| I know it is not apples to apples comparison but it's the first
| thing that came to my mind.
| csa wrote:
| > 1:1200 is probably worse than most selective universities
|
| By two orders of magnitude.
|
| Ivies range from about 1:20 to 1:10 in non-covid times.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's sort of a meaningless comparison though. A huge amount
| of self-selection goes on before an application to an elite
| university is even filled out.
| csa wrote:
| > A huge amount of self-selection goes on before an
| application to an elite university is even filled out
|
| Probably a lot less self-selecting out than you think.
| ghaff wrote:
| I must say the list is a little bit surprising to me.
| https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-
| accepta...
|
| I guess I would have expected a few top Ivies to have
| significantly lower acceptance rates on the grounds that
| one could imagine a lot of average-ish students putting
| one of those schools down just in case they hit the
| lottery.
|
| But actually, the top Ivies, MIT, West Point, top music
| schools, and a couple of schools I've never even heard of
| (!) are all in the 5 to 10% admissions range.
| csa wrote:
| > I guess I would have expected a few top Ivies to have
| significantly lower acceptance rates on the grounds that
| one could imagine a lot of average-ish students putting
| one of those schools down just in case they hit the
| lottery.
|
| There are many, many of these applicants who have roughly
| a 0% chance of admission.
|
| I am not saying that elite schools are easy to get in
| (they are not), but someone who is a strong _all-around_
| applicant will most likely get into at least one elite
| school.
|
| Most applicants are challenged by the fact that they only
| have one or two strong points (like grades and scores),
| and those "strong points" often aren't even that strong.
| Athletics, community involvement, leadership, above-and-
| beyond academics, etc. go a long way.
| sahila wrote:
| And a ton more work to file a college application and a
| smaller group of applicants. Zillow apartment
| applications is just clicking an "I'm interested" button.
| pc86 wrote:
| It's a lot easier to kick someone out of school if they stop
| paying than it is to kick someone out of an apartment.
| noahtallen wrote:
| Portland, OR solved that problem by making landlords accept the
| first offer which matches the stated requirements. Which leads
| to some... interesting incentives :p
| selestify wrote:
| Please do say, what interesting incentives appear? :)
| coolspot wrote:
| High-frequency apartment trading. If you don't submit your
| application in first 50ms after listing is up - you lose.
| novocantico wrote:
| 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.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| In the past I've done something like this: pick the
| neighborhood you're interested in. Go there and walk or drive
| around looking for "For Rent" signs. Look at public bulletin
| boards in markets and laundromats. Start making calls.
|
| That worked in the 1990s. Not sure it's viable today.
| jthrowsitaway wrote:
| It's great that worked out for you. It'd be great if people
| didn't have to get creative to find basic housing.
| sl3232323 wrote:
| Since when did housing become a right?
| zabzonk wrote:
| Since the UN was founded, and human rights were stated.
| Veen wrote:
| To which court are you going to appeal for redress when
| those rights are not upheld? The UN declaration of human
| rights is nothing but an aspirational fiction.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| A bit earlier than that, actually:
|
| _[In 1917] the government spearheaded great changes in
| people's lives, starting with housing. The Soviets
| nationalized private property and started the so-called
| "uplotnenie" (housing compaction), giving rooms to
| working-class families in large central apartments that
| used to belong to [previous owners]._ Note that renters
| were "compacted" too. _This project officially laid the
| groundwork for the often bizarre kommunalka housing - a
| resilient symbol of the Soviet past._
| https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/331621-lenin-putin-soviet-
| rus...
|
| So you are having problems looking for a 2bd apartment
| for a family of 3? What about one room in an apartment
| with a bath shared by 4 other families?
| OJFord wrote:
| 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_housing
| NullPrefix wrote:
| You mind if I crash on your couch for a while?
| OJFord wrote:
| Yes I do. But I also pay council tax and my local
| authority provides social housing.
| jahewson wrote:
| 1948
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_
| Hum...
| newsclues wrote:
| Since society decided it's better to create housing than
| to allow an army of homeless people to burn the world to
| the ground.
| [deleted]
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| > It'd be great if people didn't have to get creative to
| find basic housing _where they want to live_
|
| FTFY.
|
| There is plenty of basic housing. It just happens not to be
| where people are looking most of the time.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| How is getting lucky walking down the street "creative",
| exactly?
| novocantico wrote:
| Just keep your eyes open is all I mean. Life is strange,
| you never know what you're going to find.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| 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...
| novocantico wrote:
| It's true, I omitted a vital piece of the puzzle. Without
| it, my comment's advice does really come down to "have
| luck".
| [deleted]
| kreetx wrote:
| He perhaps asked every person that walked by? That would be
| more creative than looking at the post popular ad site.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Harassing strangers is not really something I would
| encourage no matter how creative it is.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| "Harassing" doesn't seem like the right word to describe
| asking questions to strangers. But he probably just moved
| around looking for announcements.
| wildmanx wrote:
| This is not a representative case though.
|
| A few years back, I was looking for a rental in a German city
| with a similarly hot market. One place I looked at was not very
| modern but had quite low rent, so there were 300 applicants and
| I didn't even try. Another place was put on the market 3 days
| prior, there were 5 people looking at it with me, 3 of them
| applied (including me), and I got it. It was more expensive
| though (not insane, mind you) and very modern, recently
| renovated.
|
| So, of course there will be crazy places, but if you only shoot
| for the ones with top demand, then of course you can come with
| anecdotes that sound insane.
| TillE wrote:
| 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.
| b20000 wrote:
| why did landlords take their units off the market in berlin?
| because renting out is no longer interesting?
| theplumber wrote:
| Perhaps due the regulation of the renting business.
| TillE wrote:
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| > 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?
| wildmanx wrote:
| 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.
| blub wrote:
| AFAIK it's not that hard if you find a relative to move
| into that apartment. But finding that relative may be
| hard...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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, not to
| mention they need some seriously solid ground to make a
| proper foundation... and Berlin doesn't have that.
|
| Second: that law was enacted because people were _fed up_
| with rents going up all the time - including absolutely
| ridiculous practices like "kalte Entmietung" (aka having
| construction crews in allll the time to drive out
| tenants) or charging ridiculous prices and raising rents
| while the property devolves ever more because the profits
| from the raised rents are clearly being siphoned off
| instead of being used to keep up maintenance.
|
| Third: People were _especially_ pissed off about the
| large landlords (Vonovia etc.) which bought their stock
| at fire-sale prices (literally - the 90s CDU government
| under Diepgen had left a veritable banking scandal and
| the Senate was forced to sell everything it had in the
| early 2000s for cheap) and now raised rent like there was
| no tomorrow. It was _naked and utter greed_ that turned
| the public opinion so bad.
|
| > 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.
|
| Paying rent persistently late is grounds for termination,
| it's easy to grab an eviction order at a court.
| Disturbing neighbors... well let's keep it at "having
| illegal hotels aka AirBnBs as neighbors is way worse".
|
| > No reasonable investor finds it attractive to build new
| rentals in German cities. Result is a shortage.
|
| People build like mad _wherever they still can_ and that
| is the problem. Land values in urban areas exploded -
| Munich for example had land values double in _four years_
| [1] - and the result is that because the land is so
| expensive, the resulting rental price are going to be
| exorbitantly expensive as well.
|
| In the end the solution is not the market, as the market
| will over time _only_ serve to evict the weakest of
| society - and as a result, as we have seen in Berlin and
| with the Yellow Vests in France, this has the potential
| to erode trust in democracy itself.
|
| The solution is to revitalize the rural areas. Public
| transit and high-speed Internet access are the key points
| where the suburban and rural areas across the West have
| the worst issues - fix that and people will actively move
| towards these areas instead of all being forced to
| compete for urban quarters!
|
| [1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-
| grundstueckspr...
| nemo44x wrote:
| The prices mainly went up so fast because interest rates
| in Germany went to 0 and below. Get the central bank rate
| up to 3% and you'll see property values crash.
|
| But yes I agree, make living outside cities worthwhile
| and attractive.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Evicting tenants is not easy. Even with an order, you
| can't simply dump tenants out on the street if they have
| no other home to go to. And there are ways to claim
| extenuating circumstances. We've had our share of tenants
| that trashed their places badly while not paying. And we
| didn't get a single cent of what they owed us for rent or
| damages. This wasn't in Berlin, but I don't even know how
| much money we lost. Renting out apartments is a risky
| proposition in this country.
| wildmanx wrote:
| > Your post is bordering on propaganda.
|
| Please don't. That's not how a civilized debate works.
|
| > First of all: the problem at the core is that Berlin is
| pretty much built out
|
| Sorry, when comparing to other cities world-wide, that's
| hard to buy. Places like San Francisco, ok, maybe. Ocean
| in 3 of 4 directions. Vancouver, ok, maybe. Mountains on
| 2 sides, ocean on one side, border to US on one side. But
| Berlin? It's all flat, fields and tree plantations
| ("forest") all around. Even just adding a floor or two
| here and there would be fine. There are many areas that
| could get quite some more density with 5-6 floor houses.
| But then NIMBY hits. Easier to be angry at the "rich
| landlords".
|
| > Second: that law was enacted because people were fed up
| with rents going up all the time
|
| I'm trying to tell you that that's not solving the
| problem. High rents are just a symptom. The root cause is
| a mismatch of supply and demand. It's as if you are
| trying to legislate away gravity. That won't work in the
| long run. Either you need to increase supply or decrease
| demand. I can see that you argue that rural areas should
| be strengthened, but I fail to see how that would
| suffice. People want to live in Berlin.
|
| > Third: People were especially pissed off about the
| large landlords (Vonovia etc.) which bought their stock
| at fire-sale prices
|
| The people should be pissed off at the politicians that
| sold them the stock. It was rational to buy it. Selling
| out was not. And that wasn't just CDU. Even the SPD+Linke
| senate did similar things later on. Yet, everybody gets
| reelected all the time. (Not defending CDU here, they are
| just as guilty.)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| 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...
| ascar wrote:
| > Berlin politics
|
| Berlin citizens. It's a public referendum.
|
| > seizing landlords' properties
|
| with 3000 or more units.
|
| > defending against an illegal law
|
| It's not a law and it will very likely never be one as
| it's pretty much against the constitution.
| s17n wrote:
| Land value tax solves this
| nemo44x wrote:
| Higher interest rates solve it. Or a LVT that's tied to
| interest rates - as rates go up, tax goes down etc.
|
| The problem with property taxes of course are the people
| paying them are also the people living there. So good
| luck running on that platform heh.
| pph wrote:
| 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 20EUR/m2 cold rent and some people are trying to
| (illegally) sell on old, cheap contracts for 6000EUR and more.
| bogomipz wrote:
| 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?
| gmueckl wrote:
| Can't answer the second question. As for the first one: in
| Germany, you pay rent plus an advance for certain utilities
| (heating, cold and hot water, trash collection, general
| maintenance of common areas etc.). The rent without the
| advance is commonly called "cold" rent (Kaltmiete). The
| advance is variable based on actual usage. So the common
| way to compare rents is by excluding that.
| sonicggg wrote:
| 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.
| closeparen wrote:
| 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.
| jfk13 wrote:
| I wonder how humans survived for the first, oh, 99% or so
| of the time we've been on earth?
| megous wrote:
| Barely. The humans certainly would not survive in the
| current numbers/concentrations, without all the
| civilization around them.
| tayo42 wrote:
| We've been driving to costco since neanderthals walked
| the earth
| closeparen wrote:
| Prior to the automobile era, we were all pedestrians. A
| small town was a town you could walk the length of.
| Europe is dotted with old villages denser than
| contemporary North American cities.
| ghaff wrote:
| While true, I suspect most of the people who are looking
| for walkability want something more than a small town
| with a pub, a small market, and maybe a couple other
| stores/cafes/etc. I've stayed in many of those small
| towns and they can be very pleasant--but there's not a
| whole lot within easy walking distance.
| asoneth wrote:
| My partner and I were looking for a walkable urban
| neighborhood but ultimately ended up in a small town with
| a pub, market, cafe, store... and a train to the big
| city.
|
| Couldn't be happier, but I wouldn't recommend it to
| someone who is single.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| Likewise, chose a cute little New England town when I
| realized that the benefits of living in a city are
| mostly... drunks, drugs, and concerts that are neat, but
| I'm unlikely to attend.
|
| There's culture and museums and lots of different food in
| cities, but all I really need is a small smattering of
| decent establishments in exactly the vein you just
| mentioned. And of course a good environment for working
| from home.
| ghaff wrote:
| Depending upon circumstances, there's certainly something
| to be said for spending money/effort to go into a city
| now and then rather than spending an ongoing premium for
| living there day to day which may even have certain
| negatives.
| not2b wrote:
| 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.
| goodpoint wrote:
| For sure, not by living in car-centric cities.
|
| We survived in little pedestrian-only villages. That
| thing that now is considered luxury or even a tourist
| destination.
| bsder wrote:
| > The pandemic allowed remote work to flourish. Why are
| people still crowding the cities?
|
| Because the top employers by number of people are all about
| schlepping shit from A (where population isn't) to B (where
| population is), and that can't be done remotely. Then you
| have the manufacturers, and that can't be done remotely
| either.
|
| Most jobs cannot be done solely using a computer keyboard.
| newsclues wrote:
| Cities offer more than just jobs.
|
| Culture is also concentrated.
| b20000 wrote:
| because there is nothing to do if you live in the middle of
| nowhere except maybe watching TV and screwing around with
| your computer? gets boring fast.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> The pandemic allowed remote work to flourish._
|
| Because in most of Europe (Austria for me) it didn't flourish
| and not every job can be done remotely as not everything IT
| related is web development and in many companies management
| did not give ownership and resources to maintain remote work
| IT infrastructure to anyone, so everything is chaotic and
| crumbling to bits now that things are opening up and most
| people are back in the offices.
|
| Few companies here are keeping 100% remote once the vaccine
| mandate came through and things started opening up this
| spring, and now the new standard is various hybrid work
| variants where you get 1-3 days per week remote and the rest
| in the office, or one week remote, one in the office, without
| any logic or arguments behind these choices, just "because
| management said so" and "this is how we do it here".
|
| _> Why are people still crowding the cities?_
|
| Because that's where the amenities and the networking
| opportunities still are. Universities, clubs, bars, music
| halls, swimming pools, great restaurants, bouldering halls
| and gyms, music and jazz bars and basically anything to do
| with art.
|
| Oh, and most importantly, dating. It's way more difficult to
| meet someone when you live alone in the sticks VS being
| surrounded by people your own age sharing similar interests.
| b20000 wrote:
| why did your friends leave berlin?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| 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
| extesy wrote:
| The simple answer is rent control: https://www.bloomberg.com/
| opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin...
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Rent control needs means testing. It suppresses mobility
| when the googler making $300k doesn't move to a place
| they'd rather have because their current unit is so far
| below market rate, which hurts the minimum wage worker who
| could have lived there.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Are there many googlers making $300k in Berlin?
| ng55QPSK wrote:
| The same old lie over and over again. Rent control is
| limiting the profit you can make with renting out. It
| doesn't stop profit in the first place.
|
| And btw: new built appartments have almost free price
| setting.
| jankor wrote:
| The regulation gives absolutely insane incentives. In my
| case (old contract in hip mitte area), it was easier to
| keep it and for my gf to rent another apartment on the
| outskirt where her work is as she can deduct the full
| rent from tax. Effective price for renting two apartments
| is lower than one in between the center and suburb.
| ascar wrote:
| I don't see how that has anything to do with the rent
| control regulation? What would your expectation be
| without that regulation?
|
| Doppelte Haushaltsfuhrung is a tax relief for people
| needing a 2nd place close to work. Also the work of your
| gf needs to be at least 1 hour away from the main
| apartment [1], she has to pay at least 10% of the cost of
| the main apartment to be allowed to deduct it (and maybe
| more requirements that I'm forgetting right now). She
| also has to pay 15% additional Zweitwohnungssteuer on the
| rent of the 2nd apartment.
|
| [1]
| https://www.haufe.de/personal/entgelt/verwaltungsregeln-
| zur-...
| lupire wrote:
| That's the problem -- rent controls usualy apply to only
| a bizarre arbitrary fraction of units, distorting the
| market instead of controlling it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| 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...
| ascar wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _is not a law it 's a referendum that most likely will
| never be adopted as it's illegal_
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ascar wrote:
| Would be so much better if you post a reference that's
| actually accessible without an account or even
| subscription.
| extesy wrote:
| Sorry, I had no idea that there is a paywall. I use the
| extension[1] that removes majority of paywalls.
|
| [1] https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-
| chrome-clean
| Bud wrote:
| Even better to post a reference on a basic economic issue
| that is not coming from basically the most biased
| perspective possible.
| ng55QPSK wrote:
| Berlin's population has grown 10% in 10 years. The 20 years
| before that it was stagnating or some years even shrinking.
| pc86 wrote:
| The points stand though because 10% over a decade should
| not be enough to shock a residential housing market.
| ng55QPSK wrote:
| The market of affordable apartments is shocked. In the
| luxury segment you'll find easily.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Where are you getting this data? It was 3.48 million in
| 2012 and it is of 3.57 million today, from what I can see
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/204296/berlin/population
| rr808 wrote:
| Its a bit tough to talk about nothing changing in 30 years
| and not talking about unification, which makes it a
| completely different market. After the war East and West
| overbuilt Berlin to make it a showcase where economically it
| didn't attract a lot of people.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Number of households would be the relevant measure here, not
| population.
|
| Population can stay the same, but number of single people
| wanting to live alone means less people per dwelling, which
| means more demand.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Even if the population doesn't change, if more purchase power
| moves in (e.g. struggling artists move out, software
| developers move in) the market will go up.
|
| Also, Berlin was an odd place compared to other cities in
| Europe, when it comes to housing. Looking from the outside it
| seems like it was due for an upwards correction after 3
| decades of pretty low rents since the fall of The Wall.
| dghughes wrote:
| And don't Germans traditionally prefer renting over owning? Or
| so I've heard (but I'm not German).
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| This sounds like rent caps.
| TillE wrote:
| Rents have absolutely skyrocketed over the past 15 years or
| so (3-4x), despite mild controls, so no not really.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| aqme28 wrote:
| That's part of it. The place was far below market.
| wildmanx wrote:
| 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.
| svnee wrote:
| I shared your link with some colleagues working at atHome and
| their CEO replied that your approach was interesting.
|
| Once you are in Luxembourg, feel free to reach out, I'll buy you
| a beer to console you for the expensive apartment prices ;)
|
| Always interested in what people are up to (both as an
| entrepreneur as well as a politican)
| lucb1e wrote:
| Actual title: Scraping apartment offers to show them on a map
|
| (since the current title just conveys some general topic of
| apartment need, with no indication if it's about "my partner died
| and it's interesting to notice how large a whole house is" or
| something)
| baby wrote:
| I find the flow in the US the simplest:
|
| 1. go to craigslist
|
| 2. play with the filter
|
| 3. add keywords in the search bar like "rent control" and
| "-studio"
|
| 4. go to the maps page
|
| 5. bookmark the page
|
| 6. check every day
|
| In the US/France, there's too much fragmentation and real estate
| agents
|
| In China I would go to the lady selling phone cards in the street
| and managed to visit a lot of apartments like that.
| asdff wrote:
| If you log in with craigslist you can save the search instead
| of having to bookmark and manually recheck.
| dangus wrote:
| I appreciate the talent and ingenuity behind this apartment
| hunting project.
|
| I just wonder if OP ever thought of contacting a broker? I would
| have done that before I wrote a single line of code.
|
| Scraping all this data is really great, but a human broker is
| going to know the local area and the other _human_ nuances of
| apartment searching in the local area.
|
| Plus, brokers already have access to their own software that's
| different than what's on the public Internet, along with human
| connections. Why reinvent the wheel?
|
| My last apartment came up as an option before it even hit any
| sort of public property advertisement platform, and that was
| thanks to our broker working directly with the landlord.
| mattrighetti wrote:
| I didn't actually, I'm trying to save as much money as possible
| at the moment and while a broker would be a good solution it
| would be a bit pricey for me. Maybe when I'm older and willing
| to spend money on relocating that would be a better solution
| for sure!
| dangus wrote:
| A lot of brokers work on commission that they get from the
| landlord. At least where I live, you don't really pay for a
| broker as a buyer/renter, but I admittedly don't know how
| that works in Luxembourg.
|
| A lot of brokers specialize on ex-pats, too!
|
| To expand on my point about knowing the local area, brokers
| know things like "what kind of person likes to live here?" Is
| it a young and trendy area or a quiet family neighborhood?
|
| (Admittedly, that information can be based on biases rather
| than data.)
|
| It's something to think about. I know you might be looking to
| save money, but where you live is going to be a major
| purchase decision. Plus, spending time on your own apartment
| hunting platform isn't technically free, your time is
| valuable.
|
| In any event, I'm sure with the kind of skills and dedication
| you have you'll find a place in no time.
| jrockway wrote:
| > A lot of brokers work on commission that they get from
| the landlord.
|
| It depends on the city. In NYC, the broker is pretty much
| always paid for by the person looking for an apartment, and
| it's quite a bit of money. I haven't looked for an
| apartment for 10 years, but I think it was 5-10% of the
| annual rent. (I imagine this gravy train is coming to its
| end, though. 10% was fine when your employer was paying for
| relocation, but in the All Remote future, this free money
| goes away.)
| tecleandor wrote:
| Kind of similar in Spain. Usually it's equivalent to a
| whole month rent.
|
| A new law a couple years ago mandated that, if the
| landlord is not a person (a corp / company / org...) they
| must be the ones paying the fee.
|
| But I've been "extorted" twice in the last year by
| companies moving the payment to my person. And I say
| "extorted" because they defer details or information
| about the rental until the last minute, when you are days
| away from having to leave your old place and you have no
| other option.
| codewithmatt wrote:
| I think in NY specifically it's still structured this
| way. But for the US as a whole, it's much more common for
| it to come out of the seller's end.
|
| Honestly here in Austin, unless you're walking into an
| apartment leasing office -- you're going to waste so much
| on rejected application fees by not utilizing an agent to
| rent a single family home.
| codewithmatt wrote:
| I'm not sure how Luxembourg works, but in the US the "seller"
| or landlord in this case pays a fee. Obviously this may be
| drastically different in Europe, but it's worth having a
| conversation with an agent/broker.
|
| My wife is a realtor here in TX and when she is in-between
| home sales she helps people find rent houses and apartments.
| The seller pays a pre-agreed amount of 30-40% of the first
| months rent as a type of compensation. The buyer doesn't pay
| her anything at all. She is incentivized to find the right
| property for her client so she can get paid, and she also is
| better positioned to talk to the listing agent/landlord about
| you and the current competition among applicants. She ends up
| being able to save people money on application fees that
| would never get approved.
| b20000 wrote:
| the buyer pays, as the seller adds this to the price
| bombcar wrote:
| In my experience finding a broker who actually does broker work
| is hard enough for housing you'll buy. Even harder for just
| renting. The money isn't there for them to do much more than
| setup a few saved searches.
|
| Half the houses we looked at fit the profile we wanted but we
| found ourselves.
| egberts1 wrote:
| This is the prime example of a phenomenal approach to aggregation
| of various data using various languages, in this case on about
| hunting for a decent apartment.
|
| Absolutely stellar form of data science!
|
| Keep up the great work!
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Government should provide apartments, free, in the center of the
| city, for anyone who needs one. Housing should be a human right.
| You can pay extra for a better place, but then landlords would
| actually have to compete for your business instead of the other
| way around.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Government should provide apartments, free, in the center of
| the city, for anyone who needs one.
|
| During COVID lockdowns I watched lots of international TV drama
| series on Netflix.
|
| One of those "random things I learnt on Netflix" was that they
| (sort of) offer this in the UAE if you've lived & worked there
| for 10+ years.[1]
|
| Its basically means-tested housing. So they offer anything from
| interest-free 25 year loans to fully subsidised housing.
|
| [1] https://www.tamm.abudhabi/en/aspects-of-life/benefits-for-
| em...
| sofixa wrote:
| The UAE are in a uniquely blessed situation where they have a
| small population, not a lot of land, and a ton of valuable
| resources. Not every country could pull this off without
| significantly reworking how it's tax/budget/administration
| work.
|
| That being said, there's subsidised, including to 100%,
| housing in France too. And cities are legally required to
| build affordable housing for those schemes, so it's not "it
| exists on paper, but nothing has been built in decades so
| nobody can get in".
| nicoco wrote:
| Are you insane? Then what, abolish poverty, stop human
| exploitation, and maintain the ecosystem that allows our
| species to survive? You dangerous revolutionary.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Not to mention ending militarism.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Interesting idea. What tax rate are you ready to pay? Oh, and
| who defines "needs one"?
| rr808 wrote:
| Its actually interesting to read about housing in the Soviet
| block. Housing was a right, but in reality long waiting lists,
| multi generations in cramped apartments and lots of dense
| blocks. But it kinda worked. I'm not sure how private stand
| alone housing was allocated.
| dflock wrote:
| I would love some city or government to try this experiment!
| asdff wrote:
| Despite all the fancy new websites that crop up every couple of
| years in the apartment rental space, imo the best place to find
| an apartment remains craigslist. I've only ever leased spaces
| through there. For the mom and pop landlords who you really want
| as your landlord, they might get a new client every 10 years. 10
| years ago, they were using craiglist, and it works exactly the
| same as today, so that's what they continue to use. If it gets
| them a tenant its good enough to not bother learning some other
| new website. For the large corporolandlords who have those bougie
| amenities that perhaps you crave, they will be posting on all the
| major websites including craigslist anyhow, so you might as well
| use craigslist for that use case too if only to use a less
| bloated website.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-04-09 23:00 UTC)