If you live in Berlin and often rent your apartment through Airbnb or a similar service then you might want to pay attention. The city has decided to ban entire apartment rentals on online services like Airbnb, this means that apartment owners can’t effectively transform their place into a makeshift hotel. The city hasn’t banned these services completely but it has put in place certain restrictions which residents now have to abide by.
One major concern that people have with services like Airbnb is that they tend to drive up rental rates for apartments. If it’s a city where a lot of tourists come, apartment owners are likely to make more money if they just rent it out to travelers on a short term basis, but this punishes locals who want to rent an apartment and they end up having to pay more.
To get around this problem, Berlin has now mandated that apartment owners can only rent individual rooms on services like Airbnb, they are no longer allowed to rent out whole apartments unless they first apply for and then receive a special permit.
Understandably, there are quite a few people in Berlin that are not happy with this move. They blame that the city is just scapegoating these services to make up for bad housing policies, some even accuse it of trying to protect the hotel industry.
Filed in . Read more about Airbnb. Source: independent