Tourism
Troubles: Berlin Cracks Down on Vacation Rentals
Last
year, Berlin passed a law banning unregistered vacation rentals in
the city because of a shortage of residential housing. A sharp
increase in tourism and the popularity of renting private apartments
is exacerbating a serious problem.
By Ann-Kathrin Nezik
in Berlin
April 10, 2015 –
10:18 AM
Most of Berlin is
still sleeping when Julia Krüger packs her backpack in her bare
offices on a recent cold winter morning. Krüger, who works for the
division of misappropriated apartments in the city's central Mitte
district, takes along her employee ID card, a small notebook, a
digital camera, two apples, a sandwich and some chocolate. She's
wearing athletic shoes so that she won't have any trouble climbing
stairs.
Krüger, 24, is
preparing to take back a part of Berlin that has been stolen. Today,
she'll be on the hunt for dozens of the city's illegal holiday
apartments, which, Krüger claims, are bad for the city's
neighborhoods. "I have the feeling that I am doing something
good with my work," she says.
Krüger, who wears
turquoise-colored nail polish and has the determination of an
elementary school teacher, has requested the manager of a
communist-era apartment building near Friedrichstrasse to meet her
on-site at 8 a.m. She will ask him to open the doors to apartments
which she suspects are being used as illegal vacation accommodations.
"It would be best, of course, if we run into tourists," she
says.
Twelve Million
Guests
No German city
receives more visitors than Berlin. Last year, almost 12 million
tourists checked into hotels, youth hostels or pensions in the city.
But many tourists also want to go beyond the Brandenburg Gate and TV
Tower; they want to get a feel for the real Berlin -- something they
can't find in anonymous hotels. As a result, thousands of them end up
in apartments that used to house normal Berlin residents, but are now
being rented to tourists, either on a temporary or permanent basis.
Internet portals
like Airbnb have created a niche market controlled by a handful of
commercial providers that has become massively successful. Anyone can
offer up their apartment using the service: All they have to do is
write a short description, add three or four photos and, voilá,
they've made the true Berlin experience accessible to the world. For
some renters, Airbnb has become a lucrative source of side income.
For others it is even their main earnings source. And for tourists,
it provides a much better bargain than hotels.
The Berlin
Mietergemeinschaft, a renter's rights and advocacy organization,
estimates that 18,000 vacation rentals are scattered across the city,
a number that represents enough housing for a small city. According
to research conducted by the University of Applied Sciences in
neighboring Potsdam, over 7,000 short-term accommodations in Berlin
are being offered by private individuals and commercial operations on
Airbnb alone. A short time ago, a number of German media
organizations reprinted an artist's illustration showing the number
of Airbnb offerings versus rental apartments in the Wrangelkiez, a
popular area of the city's Kreuzberg quarter. She found 102
vacation-rental listings, but only a single normal apartment for rent
on one of the top rental listings websites.
Unregistered
Vacation Rental Ban
In autumn of 2013,
the Berlin city government passed a law banning all vacation rentals
that had not been registered with the local authorities by summer
2014. The city granted an extension to just under 6,000
accommodations, but they, too, will have to be made available on the
normal apartment rental market beginning by May 2016.
The ban was imposed
to prevent the city from becoming victim to property owners who would
rather rent their apartments for €700 per week to tourists rather
than offer them to normal residents for much less. The law is also
meant to show that city officials in Berlin are taking the fight
against gentrification seriously. Julia Krüger's boss says the idea
is to create the impression among the people that the agency has an
armada of employees working to stop these illegal rentals.
But that armada is a
bit sparse in Mitte, Berlin's central district, which is also home to
the most vacation apartments. Right now it includes only four
employees, with only two of those actually conducting inspections
outside the office.
Since starting her
job six months ago, Krüger has been busy reviewing complaints from
residents in the neighborhood who believe their neighbors are
operating vacation apartments. Krüger has collected all of them in
four binders. During each shift, she inspects two to six properties
together with her colleague Diana Schmidt.
Detective Work
The two women
approach their work like detectives, piecing clues together as they
go. Indicators of a possible vacation rental can be a number instead
of a name on the doorbell or the observations of neighbors. But it is
seldom that they come across clear evidence. "We often have to
rely on our gut feeling," says Krüger.
If they consider the
evidence they have collected to be sufficient, the owners are ordered
to rent their apartment to normal renters after a hearing. So far,
though, there has not been a single instance in which the complicated
administrative procedure has been ushered through to completion.
It's frigid and dark
outside as Krüger and Schmidt, 46, reach the apartment block. The
building manager walks across the street with a bunch of keys. Krüger
has already taken photos of the gray-brown façade of the dreary East
Germany-era apartment building, which looks like it hasn't changed a
bit since the days of communism.
In the hallway, the
building manager closes the door to the first apartment on the eighth
floor. Inside, there's a worn out leather sofa and a bed frame that
has been taken halfway apart. There is no sign of any tourists and it
smells as if the windows haven't been opened for quite some time.
Krüger walks
through the apartment and photographs each room, noting that there
are "three rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom" and that it is
"vacant". The smell is even stronger in the second
apartment, where someone left household appliances and ruptured trash
bags behind on the carpet.
It's obvious that
the sloppily emptied apartments served as vacation accommodations
until a short time ago. All the furniture that has been left behind
is identical and someone forgot to remove a sign on the inside of one
of the apartments reading: "Please remember to close the door
each time you leave your apartment."
The building manager
says the apartments have been empty since last summer and that the
owner wants to demolish the structure and construct an "exlusive
new building" on the property. More than half the apartments
have been cleared. The only reason the building hasn't been torn down
yet is due to resistance from a handful of renters who are fighting
against being driven out.
Broad Approval for
Crackdown
When the Berlin
government made the decision to crack down on holiday rentals -- just
as Munich and Hamburg had previously done -- the decision was met
with broad approval. The vacation rentals had become a symbol for
everything that had gone wrong with Berlin's apartment market as well
as the tourism industry. The city is plagued with rapidly rising
rents and the socially weak are being forced out of the more
attractive central parts of the city. The city has also been helpless
in figuring out how to deal with loud partying tourists and
profiteers who are turning parts of the city into an amusement park.
Many view the battle against the vacation rentals as being decisive
in the effort to wrestle a piece of Berlin back from speculators and
tourists.
After two hours and
without finding any current vacation rental, Krüger and Schmidt
leave. The building manager points to the residential complex across
the street and says, "There are vacation apartments all over the
place there. You can tell by the curtains, which all look the same."
It looks as though the city employees may have missed their day's
quarry by just a few meters.
"I'm hungry,"
Krüger says, packing up her camera. She will later write down "third
party complaint" to note the tip-off from the building manager.
Both want to return at some point, but first they need to check
whether the vacation rental already has a legal extension until fall
under the new rules.
There's another
aspect that complicates local officials' hunt for illegal vacation
apartments. Most holiday rentals these days are only listed on the
Internet. With a few clicks on Airbnb and other sites, you can peer
into the living rooms of "elegant apartments in the Prenzlauer
Berg district" or a bathroom in a "comfy studio in
Kreuzberg." Renters almost never provide the exact address of an
apartment.
Furthermore, under
current rules, Krüger and Schmidt are allowed to search sites such
as Airbnb, but they are prohibited from using them to conduct sting
operations. Germany's data privacy law bans them from conducting any
form of undercover research.
'Needle in the
Haystack'
"As things now
stand," says Stephan von Dassel, "we're looking for the
needle in the haystack." Dassel is the district councilor for
Berlin-Mitte and is responsible for the implementation of the
vacation apartment ban. He is sitting in his office in the third
story of city hall, a man with square glasses and sharp ears, who
almost sinks into his desk chair. Dassel would like to have software
programmed that would put together an address from the clues that a
vacation-rental ad leaves behind online. He claims it would be simple
from a technical standpoint.
But he will most
likely not be able to implement his plan. Berlin's privacy
commissioner considers the use of a computer program like the one
Dassel suggests as only being permissible if there is "initial
suspicion" -- meaning, if the district authority already
suspects that illegal vacation-apartments exist in a street.
If the software
doesn't work out, Dassel says, then he only sees one other solution:
that a hacker offers him a CD with the addresses of all of the
vacation homes in Mitte. "I don't know if I would be allowed to
buy it," he says, "but I would do it." The allusion is
to a recent wave of CDs and DVDs sold by sources within Swiss and
Luxembourg banks to German government authorities for significant
sums of money in exchange for data that has helped them identify tax
evaders.
It's now a steel
blue morning two weeks after the first failed attempt. Julia Krüger
drags herself across the street in a different part of the Mitte
district; she has a cold and would rather be sitting in the office.
Diana Schmidt is holding a cigarette in her left hand, and, in her
right, a piece of paper that might be their key to success today. The
women have by chance managed to find an advertisement online that
shows the address of a vacation rental.
It is supposedly on
the ground floor of a pre-war building in a well-to-do area -- nice
furniture, 90 square meters, space for six people, according to the
ad. It costs as much as €216 per day.
Another Let Down
The blinds are down,
and nobody reacts to Krüger's ringing. The sign with the name on it
is nondescript.
Krüger presses on a
random buzzer. "Mitte district office. Misusage. Please open the
building door," she calls into the intercom system, when a
neighbor answers. Even though most Berliners are in favor of the ban,
they are occasionally called names, Krüger says, like Stasi-spy, or
they are taken for con artists. People are also sometimes angered by
the fact that, according to the law, the women may enter a suspected
vacation rental without a search warrant. Dassel, however, thinks
it's unlikely that this right would stand up before the court, if a
renter refused them entry.
A retired couple in
a bathrobe let Krüger and Schmidt into the building and then
welcomes them into their home. "I need to sit down, I have
unbearable pain," the man says, by way of greeting, and then
slumps onto a stool in the hallway. Then he starts his monologue. He
has never encountered any tourists, he claims, "and I know
everything that happens in the building." The man talks and
talks, and Julia Krüger rolls her eyes. At some point, his wife
interrupts: "To be brief, we don't know anything."
Because an online ad
is not considered sufficient proof, the case goes into the "hold
file." Krüger and Schmidt don't have any option except to
return another time. And to hope that a tourist opens the door.
Two
thirds of Berlin's tourist flats now illegal
Published: 01 Aug
2014 10:24 GMT+02:00
Two thirds of
Berlin's 12,000 tourist apartments advertised on sites such as Airbnb
were being run illegally from Friday following a law change, leaving
hosts open to potential punishment.
People renting out
their apartments to tourists had until Thursday to register with
Berlin’s Senate who will then decide whether to grant permission
for the rental or not.
Yet around two
thirds remained unregistered and were from Friday being run
illegally, the Morgenpost newspaper said.
A last minute rush
saw hundreds register their flats over the past week to avoid
possible legal consequences and an immediate ban if caught.
Many are thought to
be relying on Senate staffing shortages which may render the new law
unenforceable, the paper said.
The new rules are
part of a strategy to address what politicians say is a housing
crisis facing the German capital.
Between 10,000 and
12,000 flats are vacant and let out to tourists, most of them in the
central districts, while a housing shortage for people living in the
city has seen rents increase.
The boom in rental
apartments means people such as estate agent Marcus Buthmann can let
out nine tourist apartments in the popular north-eastern district of
Prenzlauer Berg, without owning any of them himself.
He told the
Tagesspiegel paper he rents the flats himself from a landlord and
markets them to tourists for short term vacations.
"We registered
the flats," he told the paper, but had had to get official
permission from the owner to do so.
Those letting their
apartments who voluntarily came forward by Thursday were given a
temporary grace period until April 2016 to apply for permission to
rent their flat.
Registering with the
district authorities did not guarantee a permanent permit, it only
extended the deadline to apply for longer term permission until 2016.
It is believed the
majority of applications to run a tourist flat long term will be
turned down, said the Morgenpost.
Despite being in the
news, many people who rent their apartments on sites such as Airbnb
are unaware of the new registration rules.
One woman who used
to rent out a room in her apartment on the website told The Local: “I
knew I had to pay taxes on the income but I didn’t know about any
obligation to register.”
A report last year
found that the average Berlin host earned almost €2,000 a year
through Airbnb.
Those who are now
renting their apartment to tourists should apply for permission from
the city authorities.
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