I Beat the Berlin Rental Market with a Python Script

This is why regulation of housing introduces more nightmares than it solves. Rent control eliminates used inventory. Building regulations limit new inventory.<p>Solve it by changing the laws to allow new buildings of all sorts, especially very small and cheap apartments. And by getting rid of rent control.

I did something similar with Kijiji in Montreal to find a decently priced apartment. It ended up working quite nicely and I found a 3 1&#x2F;2 lease transfer well located in an older building for 700$. I&#x27;ve since employed it for other items that I kind of want, but not enough to trawl through Kijiji regularly for.<p>For reference it was easy to set up because Kijiji thankfully still has RSS and getting timely notifications through Huginn <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;huginn&#x2F;huginn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;huginn&#x2F;huginn</a> and Pushover was simple.<p>Facebook classifieds seems to ve eating the market a bit, I haven&#x27;t tried scraping fb, I imagine there are barriers, is this true?

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

&gt;&quot;Berlin has a massive undersupply of housing — a widespread phenomenon in western cities.<p>Usually, this means that prices tend to increase. That’s what used to happen in Berlin too. Then, a couple of years ago, the city municipality passed a controversial rent control policy that prevents price increase for at least 5 years.<p>It was a very bad idea: the market completely froze and became illiquid.<p>Housing supply contracted (instead of expanding), due to lack of financial incentives.&quot;<p>PDS: <i>I&#x27;ve seen this exact same effect before, in other housing markets...</i><p>Also, a psychological observation:<p>Once people who have had a housing problem in the past find an adequate housing situation for themselves, they, not seeing housing as a problem anymore, are no longer inclined to vote for the politicians and&#x2F;or public housing policies that would help large amounts of <i>other</i> people with their housing problems...<p>Housing, that is, getting the issues around housing exactly correct from a law&#x2F;government&#x2F;macroeconomic&#x2F;public policy perspective -- with a rapidly expanding world population and many homeless people in the world&#x27;s cities -- is, or will be, I think, as future historians look back in time:<p><i>One of the defining issues of Earth&#x27;s 21st Century History...</i>

I&#x27;ve been looking for land for a while, and often thought of making a tool will let you input the normal filters for property search, but include things like distance&#x2F;time to specific locations (Library, Grocery, Home Depot, Costco, etc.), as well as to major freeways. Other ideas including giving ratings based on terrain, flood plains, etc.

&gt; I honestly have no clue if there’s a market for this product.<p>I bet you there is. Try offering it as a service of some sort.

This is a really neat project! I can follow and dupe everything in the writeup until the OP casually mentions:<p>&gt; To get these numbers I trained two supervised models. I fine-tuned the pipeline and hyperparameters with genetic programming on an AWS GPU-heavy machine.<p>Can anyone recommend some ways to level up a bit in this domain to feel more comfortable? I&#x27;m somewhat familiar and understand the underlying concepts to a certain extent, such as supervised vs nonsupervised, but need hands-on practice, what do you recommend?

I&#x27;ve done something similar (not in German market) but instead decided to have a chat bot inform me whenever there was a new offer matching my criterias and it also helped me find a flat cheap and in the place I wanted. But your post inspires me to improve that further :)

I have done some scraping on my own of some real estate listing websites on my city and applied some filters.<p>The OP goes much deeper into that idea and I can totally see the need for such a thing. I didn&#x27;t go much deeper in the idea as I have found something something interesting meanwhile, but this is a need, for sure.

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

The post states: &gt;&quot;There are two elements that influence your ability to be selected and get the contract: your profile, and your speed.&quot;<p>Can someone say what &quot;profile&quot; the author is referring to here?<p>Also the apartment photo in the post shows a newish looking almost 64 square meter place with a balcony in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg on Karl Marx Allee for 1497.56 Euros. This seems like a decent location in a good neighborhood with a decent amount of space. Is this considered expensive for Berlin right now?