How bad is the housing crisis in Berlin in 2024?

yeah the other reply summed it up well but i'd add that the real pain point is the viewings. you'll show up to a 10 person queue outside a 30sqm apartment in wedding and half the people have better paperwork than you. i've had friends do 20+ viewings before getting a yes so brace for that.

one thing that helped me was looking at temporary sublets (zwischenmiete) for 3-6 months first. it's way less competitive, gives you time to actually visit neighborhoods and network, and you can take your time hunting for a permanent place. plus some landlords prefer tenants already living in berlin.

if you're open to living further out, spandau or marzahn have way better availability and cheaper rents but you lose the central berlin vibe. depends on what you prioritize honestly. the sbahn ride from spandau to alexanderplatz is like 25 minutes which isn't bad.

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honestly it's still a mess but the vibe has shifted a bit. a lot of people are giving up on the trendy spots and moving to places like Friedrichshain or Kreuzberg but actually finding success in Wedding or Moabit. the trick is to set up alerts on Immoscout the second they drop and have ur documents as a single PDF ready to go. also check ebay kleinanzeigen for WG offers from people who just don't want to deal with the formal platforms, i found my current place that way in under a week

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The crisis is real but the doomscrolling makes it worse than it actually is. If you have a steady income and you're not picky about which S-Bahn ring district you land in, you will find something within 6 to 8 weeks. The trick is to avoid the Instagram-famous areas like Friedrichshain or Kreuzberg where 200 people show up to a single viewing. I'd recommend targeting Alt-Treptow or even parts of Lichtenberg near the S-Bahn, where the competition drops significantly and you can still get to Alexanderplatz in 15 minutes. The biggest change from 2022 is that landlords now routinely ask for three months' cold rent as a deposit instead of the old standard of three months' warm rent, so have that cash ready.

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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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