How fast Berlin apartments get rented
🇩🇪 Diese Studie auf Deutsch lesen
We tracked 3,740 Berlin rental listings from the moment they appeared until they went offline again, between 2026-05-24 and 2026-08-27. The result is clearer than we expected: price decides the speed — not size, and not district.
Half of all listings were gone after 24 hours.
Price decides, not size
Flats under €600 cold rent are 31% gone after four hours. Between €1,000 and €1,300 it is 3.4% — a factor of 9. Median lifetime rises from 17.2 hours to 11.4 days.
Share that was offline after four hours.
That it really is the price and not the size shows in the room count: between the fastest and the slowest room count there are barely five percentage points — against 27 for rent.
| Rooms | n | after 4h | median |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 rooms | 842 | 23% | 22.4 hours |
| 2 rooms | 1,614 | 23.2% | 24.7 hours |
| 3 rooms | 969 | 27.1% | 22.8 hours |
| 4+ rooms | 315 | 22.2% | 2.3 days |
Cross-check: is it just the provider?
An obvious objection: perhaps the cheaper providers simply let flats faster. If so, the effect should disappear once you look at a single provider. It does not — all three of the largest sources in our dataset show the share falling as rent rises, and above €800 the median lifetime jumps to ten days or more. Providers are anonymised here on purpose: the finding is about the market, not about any individual company's conduct.
By district
In Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg a listing is 69.7% gone after four hours, with half gone after 1.7 hours. In Reinickendorf it is 5.3%.
With and without a WBS
Subsidised (WBS) flats go faster from the first hour — 26% against 23.5% after four hours. The gap widens sharply over a day: WBS flats are 59.7% gone within 24 hours, open-market flats 47.3%. You have to be quick either way — the open market just leaves a little more time.
| Type | n | after 4h | after 24h | median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WBS required | 827 | 26% | 59.7% | 18.7 hours |
| Open market | 2,913 | 23.5% | 47.3% | 26.7 hours |
Method
Population. Every listing we saw appear and disappear again on the sites of ten Berlin housing providers between 2026-05-24 and 2026-08-27 — 3,740 in total. Listings still online are excluded; they would contribute a lifetime that has not finished yet.
The clock. Measured from our first sighting, not from publication — when a provider puts a listing live is not observable from outside. A listing may already have been online before we saw it. Every figure here is therefore an upper bound: the real market is, if anything, faster.
"Disappeared". The listing was no longer on the provider's site. Usually that means let — but a provider can also withdraw an advert for their own reasons. The two cannot be told apart from outside, and we do not claim otherwise.
Limits. We check each landlord every few minutes, so sub-hour figures are coarse. Districts with fewer than 50 observed listings are not shown. The analysis covers ten large providers, not the private market. Individual providers are not named: how long a listing stays online also depends on how a company maintains its site, so no conclusion about any single landlord can be drawn from this analysis.
Free to reuse
Every figure on this page may be reused freely, including commercially, with attribution — licence CC BY 4.0. "WohnAutopilot, analysis of 3,740 Berlin listings 2026" plus a link to this page is enough.
For press enquiries, the underlying aggregates, or a breakdown for a specific district: get in touch. We share the aggregate data on request.
What this means for your search
If you check the portals in the evening, the affordable flats are already gone — 31% of them within four hours of going live. WohnAutopilot watches eight providers around the clock and applies in your name in under five minutes.
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