Yeah there is always this one smart person with very old rental contract. Let me quickly travel in time a grab something in Berlin for EUR 600. Good luck next time you'll end up scanning the apartment listings.
It’s not an old contract, only 2 years old at this point, it’s cheap thanks to a Genossenschaft. Buy yes we’ve been lucky, I would be glad to see more people benefiting from Genossenschaft, it’s a fantastic system.
Edit: I moved 5 times since 2015, across 3 countries, I know how horrible and difficult it is to find flats, even more in a place where you’re not speaking the language or know the culture. I never pretended it was simple. I’ve been refused flats for absurd reasons such as because of my foreign last name (like, explicitly), or because I was working remotely before it was considered acceptable.
Last time I was looking for a rental in Berlin the norm was to be ghosted after submitting paper portfolio with full professional, financial, and credit info.
Yeah, it’s a real pain. Lots of application to send, lots of visiting all across the city, lots of printed form to fill over and over again with the same info you already sent. We had the same experience in Hamburg the first and second times, you first need to find something temporary just to be able to visit places, then spend weeks going through the whole process.
Did you have a better experience in Munich or Frankfurt? From what I heard Munich is also its own mess when looking for flats. No idea about Frankfurt (I just visited once and loved the place but don’t know people living there).
