Are AirBnBs illegal in Berlin?

honestly the registration code thing is mostly for show in cases like this. the law says you can rent out your whole apartment for up to 90 days per year but only if you actually live in the city and have a valid reason like a temporary work assignment abroad. if she's living downstairs she prob just registered the apartment under some fake story about being abroad and then never updated it

your bigger issue is that she's trying to force you out without a proper eviction process. that's straight up illegal, even if the rental itself is illegal. in berlin tenants have strong protections, and you've already paid. call the mieterverein or a lawyer if you can, they handle this kind of harassment. for the illegal rental part, email the bezirksamt's zweckentfremdungsstelle directly with her name and the registration number, they take these complaints seriously and will send someone to check

also fyi the 90-day limit is per host per apartment per calendar year, not per booking. so if she's been renting this out for months at a time she's way over that already. the fine for that can be up to 500k euro, which is why some hosts still risk it

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yeah so that registration code in the ad doesn't actually guarantee it's legal, it just means they applied for permission at some point. the real issue is that zweckentfremdungsverbot law limits short-term rentals to 90 days per year total per host, not per booking, and they need to be living in the unit themselves for most of that time. if she's literally living downstairs and renting this one out full-time, she's almost certainly breaking the rules

you can check if the registration is valid by looking up the number on berlin.de's zweckentfremdung page, but honestly your bigger problem is that she's harassing you. call the bezirksamt for your district and ask for the zweckentfremdungsverbot team, they handle complaints about illegal rentals and will actually investigate. also document everything with her in writing, texts or emails are best, because she's trying to illegally evict you which is a separate issue from the airbnb stuff

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Officially? Nah. Practically? The city's got a lot of rules about short-term rentals, so it's a bit of a grey area. Best to check the specific regulations for the property you're looking at.

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Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

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if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

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honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

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