As of May 1, a law came into force prohibiting Berlin residents from renting out apartments for short-term stays without registration.
According to Deutsche Welle, property owners must now obtain a permit that gives them the right to offer apartments for rent to tourists. Otherwise, they face a fine of up to 100,000 euros. Renting out individual rooms is still allowed only if the owner also lives in the apartment.
Leading intermediary websites have already taken steps to ensure that their users posting rental offers comply with the law. On April 27, the newspaper DieZeit reported that Airbnb had begun removing listings from some Berliners, but the company itself did not respond to requests for comment.
About 6,300 apartments could return to the Berlin housing market, but this would be a drop in the ocean in a city with nearly 2 million apartments and, according to rough estimates, a shortage of more than 100,000 housing units. Each year, about 40,000 new residents come to Berlin, not counting the 50,000 refugees who arrived in the German capital in 2015. A study published in January of this year by the real estate investment company CBRE reported that since 2014, the average rental cost in the city has increased by five percent. In central districts, by seven percent.
However, it remains unclear how many apartments and houses are rented out for short-term stays in the German capital. A study conducted last year on behalf of the German construction company GBI mentions 24,000 apartments and suggests that only a quarter of them were rented legally. Wiebke Werner, deputy managing director of the Berlin Tenants' Association, asserts that according to various estimates, between 12,000 and 29,000 apartments have been rented to tourists.
After the legislative change in 2014, local authorities began urging residents to report suspected illegally rented "weekend apartments" via a special anonymous online portal. Now authorities have taken another step in this direction – 30 new positions have been created for employees who conduct random checks of apartments supposedly illegally rented to tourists. And online short-term rental services like Airbnb and Wimdu can now be forced to provide authorities with information about registered property owners.
The new ban is a major problem for such online resources. After all, Berlin is undoubtedly the largest market for short-term rental of private housing. According to GBI, more than 6 million overnight stays in the German capital take place in private apartments each year – three times more than in second-place Hamburg, where only 2 million overnight stays per year are in private apartments.
"This law is one of the stupidest legislative norms ever adopted in Germany," said Roman Bach, managing director of the portal 9flats, in an interview with Deutsche Welle. He questions whether 24,000 private apartments are actually being rented out short-term in Berlin, as the same apartments may have been counted multiple times because they are listed on several online platforms.
But let's assume the figure of 20,000 apartments is real, Bach continues. "Even if 6,000 of them are returned to the housing market, how many cents per square meter do you think your current rent will drop if the market still lacks 100 or even 140,000 housing units? Do you really believe you'll be able to rent a cheaper apartment?" asks the head of the portal.
Wiebke Werner from the Berlin Tenants' Association agrees that the law's impact on the market will be minimal, but that nevertheless does not deprive it of significance. In Werner's words, this measure is a kind of signal: "We must make it clear that existing affordable apartments must be accessible to tenants. The supply on the housing market is constantly decreasing, and we have to try to protect every existing rental home."
Representatives of short-term rental intermediary websites argue that the negative impact of the new law on tourism development will far outweigh any expected positive consequences. "We understand the concerns of the city authorities, but we do not share them," emphasizes Aye Helsig, regional director of the international platform HomeAway/FeWo-direkt. According to him, mostly families stay in guest apartments, who do not cause any inconvenience to neighbors. And such tourists bring considerable income to the city's economy.