Berlin Cracks Down on Thousands of Fake Rental Listings

Berlin's Senate Department for Urban Development confirmed last month that a formal review of online rental portals is now underway, targeting the widespread use of duplicated and manipulated property images that have distorted the city's already strained housing market. The review, which covers platforms operating within the Berlin metropolitan area, marks the clearest official acknowledgment yet that the problem has moved well beyond a consumer-nuisance category into something that actively undermines fair access to housing.

The timing matters. Berlin's SPD-led coalition has spent the better part of two years trying to revive a workable rent cap after the Federal Constitutional Court struck down the earlier Mietendeckel in 2021. Any credible rent-stabilisation framework depends on accurate market-price data, and accurate market-price data depends, in part, on listings that honestly represent what is actually on offer. When the same Altbau flat in Neukölln appears simultaneously under four different asking prices with four different sets of photographs, the dataset that policymakers and courts rely on becomes noise.

A Problem That Grew With the Market

The mechanics are straightforward. A landlord or intermediary takes a single set of photographs, say, a 62-square-metre apartment near Herrfurthplatz in Schillerkiez, and posts the listing across ImmobilienScout24, eBay Kleinanzeigen, and WG-Gesucht simultaneously, sometimes adjusting the rent by €50 to €150 between platforms to test price sensitivity. Occasionally the images are lifted from a different property entirely. From 2020 onward, AI-generated interior renders began appearing in listings for properties that either did not yet exist or bore no resemblance to the advertised images.

Berliner Mieterverein, the city's largest tenants' association with roughly 170,000 members, has tracked complaints about misleading listing photographs since at least 2019. The volume of such complaints roughly doubled between 2020 and 2023, according to figures the organisation has cited in its annual reports. The Verbraucherzentrale Berlin, which operates advice centres at locations including Hardenbergplatz 2 near Zoo station, has logged hundreds of individual cases where prospective tenants paid reservation fees or Schufa-check costs for properties that turned out to look nothing like their advertised images.

The phenomenon accelerated sharply after 2022. A tightening supply, Berlin's own housing department estimated a shortfall of around 50,000 units entering that year, created conditions where applicants were so desperate that many stopped scrutinising listings carefully. Fake or recycled images carried lower risk for bad-faith listers because the volume of competing applicants meant someone would always bite.

What the Review Covers and What Comes Next

The Senate review is examining whether existing provisions under the Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, Germany's domestic implementation of the EU Digital Services Act, which came into full force in February 2024, can be applied to mandate image-verification checks on high-traffic rental platforms. The DSA requires very large online platforms to conduct risk assessments for systemic harms, and housing misinformation has been explicitly named in European Commission guidance documents as a candidate harm category.

Practically speaking, platforms above a certain user threshold are already required to provide researchers with data access. Berlin's Senate could, in theory, commission an independent audit of listing-image duplication rates on the major portals, something Hamburg's consumer protection office attempted on a smaller scale in 2024.

For renters currently navigating the market in neighbourhoods like Friedrichshain or Wedding, the interim advice from Verbraucherzentrale Berlin is consistent: request a confirmed in-person or video viewing before transferring any money, run a reverse-image search on every photograph in a listing, and report suspected duplicates to the portal using its internal flagging tool, which all major platforms are now legally required to provide under DSA rules. Listings that cannot be verified within 48 hours of a viewing request are, statistically, the most likely to be fraudulent or misleading.

The Senate review is expected to publish preliminary findings before the end of the third quarter. Whether that translates into binding platform obligations or simply another advisory framework will depend heavily on how the coalition balances regulatory ambition against the legal constraints of applying state-level rules to federally operating digital services.