As a tenant living in Berlin, the lede is buried in the last paragraph.
To complicate Berlin’s situation further, Germany’s constitutional court is expected in the coming months to decide whether these rent controls are even legal. If the judges nix the legislation, lots of tenants in the formerly regulated sector could get hit by huge and even retroactive increases in their rents. That would create yet more chaos.
The current Berlin housing market Situation has little definite insights on the effects of rent control, but all about risk aversion and maximization of profits.
The current shortage of supply is all about landlords withholding their vacant listings until that final court order. Or they are cashing out by selling them after fantastic interest rates averging above 10% year over the last decades.
If you feel you have like a 60% chance of getting double the rent, you avoid it at literally at all costs, below that threshold, to rent out on unlimited terms, if you can affor it in any way possible.
Where you're stuck on the long established mandated single digit rent increments, if the current pratice of shadow contracts should prove to be not enforcable.
There simply is just so much more uncertainty than actual rent control happening for the time being.
My immediate neigborhood, with quite a few empty appartments?!
Even the service workers asked to install the mandated smoke detectors were commenting about this, since they can't access quite a few of appartments even during COVID's stay at home policies.
There is no offical data on this, since it's illegal to keep them vacant for more than 3 months. So they are under "maintenance" or the like.
In San Francisco, there are plenty of people who have the same anecdotes as you, but their story falls apart when you look at the numbers. Yours may as well.
To complicate Berlin’s situation further, Germany’s constitutional court is expected in the coming months to decide whether these rent controls are even legal. If the judges nix the legislation, lots of tenants in the formerly regulated sector could get hit by huge and even retroactive increases in their rents. That would create yet more chaos.
The current Berlin housing market Situation has little definite insights on the effects of rent control, but all about risk aversion and maximization of profits.
The current shortage of supply is all about landlords withholding their vacant listings until that final court order. Or they are cashing out by selling them after fantastic interest rates averging above 10% year over the last decades.
If you feel you have like a 60% chance of getting double the rent, you avoid it at literally at all costs, below that threshold, to rent out on unlimited terms, if you can affor it in any way possible.
Where you're stuck on the long established mandated single digit rent increments, if the current pratice of shadow contracts should prove to be not enforcable.
There simply is just so much more uncertainty than actual rent control happening for the time being.