Rooms for Rent in Copenhagen

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.

Here, the municipality of Copenhagen divides into ten administrative districts, which serve as its statistical and tax divisions as well.

How many people already live there sits on the listing, next to the amount asked.

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.

Picking an area by name assumes knowing it; setting the map over what one wants to see assumes nothing of the sort.

The language filter bears on people, and Danish sits there among twenty-four values.

Closest at hand, the rent board the municipality holds, which settles disagreements between landlords and tenants in private rental housing: that is the Huslejenævn.

At national level, Social- og Boligstyrelsen (the Danish Authority of Social Services and Housing, under the Ministry of Social Affairs, Housing and Senior Citizens, which oversees the public housing sector and advises the municipalities) publishes on sbst.dk.

Quoloc repeats nothing published there, and says no more about what is decided there.

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.

A question asked before the viewing saves learning on the doorstep what the listing did not say.

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.

None of the ten districts was singled out to reach that amount, which holds for the municipality taken as one.