Rooms for Rent in Berlin

A shared-home listing carries the rent and its currency, what the rent covers, the floor area, whether the room is furnished, the dates it is available, the minimum stay, who is letting it (a roommate, an owner or an agency) and how many people already live there. Twenty-four amenities are ticked, from wifi to a private bathroom, and the household states its house rules, its languages and where it stands on pets and smoking. All of that can be read before writing.

The map on a listing shows a five-hundred-meter circle around the home, never an exact point: Quoloc does not publish the address, and only the person advertising can choose to give it in the exchange. A Street View tab shows the street where coverage exists.

A listing written locally will readily use WG where another writes shared apartment, and both name the same thing: a shared home with a room to let.

How many people already live there reads on the listing, and it weighs as much as the rent between two neighboring ones.

The list of rooms for rent filters on price, dates, minimum stay, furnished or not, pets, smoking and spoken languages; with Quoloc Plus, also on the kind of household, the twenty-four amenities, the type of property, who is letting and how many roommates are already there. Moving the map narrows the list to what is in view.

Twelve boroughs and ninety-seven quarters do not read in one go: bringing the map down to what fits on screen sorts without anyone typing a name.

The language filter bears on people, and German sits among its twenty-four values like any other.

Below the city sits a tier that genuinely governs: the city is made up of twelve boroughs, subdivided into ninety-seven officially recognized quarters, and each borough's assembly is directly elected by its own population, which makes it a borough parliament: it appoints a borough mayor at the head of an executive of five councillors.

Above it comes Berlin also counts among the states of Germany, and its Abgeordnetenhaus is their parliament: its members, at least one hundred and thirty of them, are elected by direct proportional ballot, choose the Governing Mayor and check the Senate of Berlin, knowing that the city tier and the state tier coincide in Berlin, where one and the same assembly legislates for both, with no separate city council of its own.

At federal level, Bundesministerium für Wohnen, Stadtentwicklung und Bauwesen publishes (the German federal ministry responsible for housing, urban development and building), and its address is bmwsb.bund.de.

Exchanges happen in the site's messaging. You can write from the moment you register, without the other person having to allow anything: a published listing and a published profile are both contactable. Messages stay grouped and the history remains available.

One and the same detector runs over listings, messages, comments and profiles. It recognizes an email address, a phone number, a social media handle and a web address, including ones written to fool a machine: an address broken up with "(at)" and "(dot)" is caught, and so is a number spaced out digit by digit. The exchange therefore stays where reporting and blocking exist.

Answering in the language the listing was written in spares a round trip, and the languages stated on both sides say which one before any first message.

Every listing carries a public comment thread. A reply cannot itself receive a reply: the thread stays one level deep.

The median is used rather than the average: two unusual listings are enough to move an average, but not a median.

Neither carving served to establish this figure: not the twelve boroughs, nor the ninety-seven quarters they hold.