Berlin on Airbnb: What are the most and least expensive districts?

Defne Altiok

Hi! It’s Defne again. Here’s another Weekly Chart by me. If you missed the one from last week, check it out!

Airbnb is popular. So is Berlin! But the city has a rather complicated relationship with one of the most popular and touristic portals for finding a proper place to stay in a city: In 2016, Airbnb-rentals were banned, then the ban was canceled but strict rules remained.^[1]

Inspired by this discussion (especially by typically long German words such as “Zweckentfremdungsverbot”), I thought it could be worth checking the current situation in Berlin: What is the most expensive district on Airbnb in Berlin?

I thought the story would be more interesting than what I found out. But there are no surprises, dear readers: The central regions are more expensive than the rest of the city and tourists want to stay at the center.

The districts at the peripheries of the city are greyed out on this map. This doesn’t mean I didn’t have any data about them. I had! But these districts had 25 or less Airbnbs – and it felt wrong to compare the average price of e.g. 4 Airbnbs with the average price of more than 800 (like in Alexanderplatz).

Think of Amazon reviews. You wouldn’t trust just two or even ten reviews. You know that the more people reviewed, the more you can trust the average rating. It’s the same with the price averages: The more data points we average, the more reliable it gets.

So I decided to get rid of the Amazon reviews districts with less than 25 Airbnbs. But I don’t want to withhold these districts from you entirely. I guess, somehow (Hi Lisa!), I was convinced that scatterplots are usually great and quite useful to show correlations. So I made one! Here’s a scatterplot with the hidden districts:

The area below the line shows the region with Airbnbs that cost, on average, less than the average price. As the famous Berlin slogan goes, they are “poor but sexy”. Neukölln and Wedding are still hanging in there!

This was my last article at Weekly Chart and Lisa will take over next week again (maybe)! If you have any questions or feedback, you can find me on Twitter at @AltiokDefne or via email (defne.altiok@dw.com).

1. Here is a detailed piece with lots of beautiful graphics from 2015 explaining how it started.↩︎

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Defne Altiok

(@AltiokDefne) was a journalist with Deutsche Welle's traineeship programme. She was spending a month in spring 2019 as our intern to learn more about creating simple, effective and shareable visuals as a data journalist.

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