When Berlin sublets get posted

What to do with this

The useful takeaway 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 the poster's inbox, falls almost entirely inside the working day. If you only check your phone at eleven at night, you see each flat half a day late, behind everyone who saw it over lunch.

The quiet hours are quiet for posting, not for reading. Almost nothing new appears between midnight and 8am, so a late-night search mostly turns up listings everybody else has already answered.

This is also the case 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 shows each one as soon as it is posted rather than 48 hours later.

Method, and what this is not

Telegram only, on purpose. 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 chart our own crawler's schedule and present it as the behaviour of Berlin's landlords.

2175 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 people. The same coverage caveat applies as for 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.