🇩🇪 This article is also available in German

The popularisation of remote work increases the demand for flexible month-to-month housing not just in Berlin but worldwide for good or bad. It already creates new challenges for cities, governments, citizens and international employers.

I decided to analyse this growing market and provide insights to both renters and landlords, so they can make better decisions on searching and offering short-term apartments in Berlin.

Here is how the data in this article can help you:

• Renters and employers — optimise your search and maximise chances to find a temporary furnished apartment for yourself or your employees.
• Landlords — optimise your supply and offer apartments in the right size in the right place for the right price providing more value to the renters.

Solutions for temporary furnished apartments in Berlin

There are several companies offering hundreds of apartments available for month-to-month leases in Berlin:

• Wunderflats — 2800 apartments in Berlin
• Spotahome — 1174 apartments in Berlin
• HomeLike — 900 apartments in Berlin
• HousingAnywhere — 700 apartments in Berlin

Why analyze specifically Wunderflats

Each of these companies raised tens of millions of capital and has tens or hundreds of employees. Wunderflats has its headquarters in Berlin and seems to be focusing its operations on the Berlin market, so I decided to base my analysis on its offerings. I assume that Wunderflats is representative of the short-term apartments market in Berlin just by having the biggest supply.

Districts with most apartments offered on Wunderflats

Price per district

The median price for m2 on Wunderflats in Berlin is €32.10. In the 10 most popular neighbourhoods, the median price is €33.20.

Keep in mind that the apartments on Wunderflats are fully furnished and their price includes electricity, heating, water, and additional costs like trash management, building management, internet, etc. They sometimes include cleaning services, broadcasting fee expenses and change of the letterbox and labels.

Apartments size

The most popular segment of flats on Wunderflats is 2-room apartments (45% of all apartments), followed by 1-room apartments (30%). Apartments with 3 rooms are 18% of all Wunderflats supply, 4 rooms are just 5% and 4+ rooms are 2%.

The median size of an apartment on Wunderflats is 55m2. Here are the median sizes of apartments with different amounts of rooms:

• 1 room — 36m2
• 2 rooms — 56m2
• 3 rooms — 83m2
• 4 rooms — 110m2

Minimum stay requirements

Only 2.5% of apartments require a minimum stay longer than 6 months.

Renters — your best bet is to look for an apartment for at least 6 months. This way you’ll have 97.5% of all offerings potentially available for you (only by this criteria, of course). Here’s how many of the offers will be relevant to you with different lengths of stay:

• 1 month — 21%
• 2 months — 39%
• 3 months — 68%
• 6 months — 97.5%

Landlords — (the minimum stay data represents the supply and not the demand, but it still could be a useful benchmark) avoid requesting a minimum stay longer than 6 months. By requesting a 3-month minimum you will be in the majority group of offerings (68%).

Floors

The lower the floor, the more offerings it will have (besides the ground floor).

Smoking and pets policies

Only 7% of apartments on Wunderflats allow smoking and 14% allow pets.

Renters — unfortunately, your chances to find an apartment allowing either is very low.

Landlords — by allowing pets or smoking you can potentially get the demand that most other apartments won’t be able to capture (Wunderflats offers a dedicated filter for apartments allowing smoking and pets).

Apartments availability

First of all, the demand for apartments on Wunderflats in Berlin is huge. About half of all apartments are booked out for the next 4,5 months. Close to 100% of apartments become available in 1 year.

Here’s how much of all apartments will be available for you if you’re looking to move in soon:

• Move in in 1 month — 13%
• 2 months — 22%
• 3 months —29%
• 4 months — 44%

The biggest jump in availability happens between 3 and 4 months, although it could be because it happens to be the beginning of a new year).

(Calculation remarks: for this calculation I removed apartments with more than 6-month minimum stay since there are a few of them but they are likely to skew the results.)

Renters — most apartments become available on the 1st day of the month (the «stairs» you see on the graph). To maximise your chances to find an apartment, when possible — search for dates starting with the 1st day of the month (or even better — the 2nd or 3rd since many landlords may use a day or two for cleaning) and avoid searching for move in dates starting at the and of the month.

Demand by the apartment size

I made an assumption that availability can indicate how popular an apartment is. The logic behind it is that an apartment that is available in 2 months seems to be less popular than an apartment that is available in 4 months.

This way I could determine what the top apartment sizes in demand are 1-room and 2-room apartments (137 days until they become available). The bigger the apartment, the higher its availability.

Districts with the highest demand (or not enough supply)

Following the same assumption about apartment demand indication, here are the top 20 districts with most apartments in Berlin for short-term housing (that I showed before) sorted by popularity:

As we’ve seen from previous data, Wedding, Gesundbrunnen, and Pankow are neighbourhoods where apartments are priced on the lower end. So I’d suggest that the reason for these districts to be popular is due to their relative affordability compared to others.

Reach out for more info

If you’ve found the data helpful or have any questions, feel free to reach out 😊