When Berlin sublets actually get posted

What to do with this

The useful version is not “check at the peak”. It is that the window in which a listing is fresh — the first hour, when a reply still lands near the top of someone's inbox — falls almost entirely inside the working day. If you only look at your phone on the sofa at eleven at night, you are seeing each flat half a day late, behind everyone who saw it over lunch.

The corollary is that the quiet hours are quiet for posting, not for reading. Almost nothing new appears between midnight and 8am, so a late-night search is mostly a search through what everybody else already answered.

This is also the honest argument for what we do: nobody can watch a dozen group chats through a working day. A free account puts every listing from those groups and the big listing sites into one feed, and a pass gets each one the minute it lands rather than 48 hours later.

Method, and what this is not

Telegram only, and that is a restriction rather than an oversight. Our corpus has three sources and the timestamp means something different in each. A Telegram message carries the moment somebody hit send. Kleinanzeigen publishes an ad's date but no time, so every ad would land at midnight. WG-Gesucht publishes no date at all to a logged-out request, so the only timestamp available is the moment our scraper fetched it. Blending those would produce a chart of our own crawler's schedule, presented as the behaviour of Berlin's landlords.

651 posts, all of them offers rather than people looking, de-duplicated so a flat cross-posted to five groups counts once. Hours are converted to Berlin local time, including across the October clock change. This describes the Telegram end of the market, which skews towards English-speaking and newly arrived Berlin — the same coverage caveat as the rent data.

Free to use with attribution, like everything else on our data page. If you want the underlying histogram as a file, ask.