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Berlin (dpa / bb) - According to a study, a large part of the rental prices advertised on the Immoscout24 apartment portal for Berlin are still above the permissible level of the rent cap.
“In January 2021, according to calculations by ImmoScout24, 76 percent of the newly advertised offers were above the rent cap in the entire Berlin urban area,” the platform announced on Thursday.
But this only shows the tendency, said a spokesman.
So it is quite possible that some of the examined rental prices in the offers are so-called shadow rents.
The landlord often specifies this in order to make it clear which rent is due if the rent cap does not exist before the Federal Constitutional Court.
After all, even if many asking rents still exceeded the legal limit, they have fallen by an average of 7.8 percent since the rent cap came into force around a year ago.
All figures and data therefore relate exclusively to newly advertised apartments that would also be affected by the Rent Cap Act, i.e. were completed before 2014.
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For a year now, rents in Berlin for around 1.5 million apartments have been frozen at the June 2019 level - initially limited to five years until 2025.
From 2022 onwards, inflation compensation will only be allowed, which would be 1.3 percent per year as things stand.
If an apartment is rented out again, the landlord must adhere to the last rent requested as well as upper limits based on the age, furnishings and location of the apartment.
Housing companies strongly criticize the law and are now also suing the Federal Constitutional Court.
According to Immoscout24, the supply of apartments that fall under the rent cap has fallen significantly since the law came into force - by almost 59 percent between October 2019 and October 2020.
"The high number of rental offers that are above the rent cap is no longer surprising," said the manager of the Berlin tenants' association, Reiner Wild, on Thursday.
The association sees its estimate that 80 percent of landlords demand higher rents than the rent cap allows, confirmed.
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The Association of Berlin-Brandenburg Housing Companies (BBU) criticized the investigation of the platform as undifferentiated.
"We consider the validity of the study to be questionable," said BBU spokesman David Eberhart.
"Obviously, the landlord's field information was evaluated according to an undifferentiated scheme, without being able to go into additional textual information."
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210218-99-498743 / 2
Press release Immoscout24