People in Berlin are just about as obsessed with real estate as in New York–but in slightly different ways. First of all, I haven’t heard ANYONE in Berlin talking about buying apartments. It seems that everyone here rents.
Second, people here are even more obsessed with neighborhoods than they are in New York. One reason is that Berlin is very spread out. Thus the choice of a neighborhood is even more important than in New York, where you can often walk from one to the other in a matter of minutes. Also, given the history of Berlin as a divided city, the different neighborhoods have very distinct characters — in terms of everything from the age, ethnicity and wealth of the people who live there to the architectural style. Indeed, probably because of the rapid changes the city has gone through in the last 20 years, there seems to be constant movement within the city — as in New York, it is particularly the young “hipsters” and artists who seem to be perpetually on the move from one formerly neglected area to another.
Finally, size really matters here. Whenever I talk about my apartment to a Berliner, the first thing I am often asked, even before where it is located, is, “Wie viel Quadratmeter?” (How many square meters?). Many apartment ads display this number more prominently than anything else, and people determine whether an apartment is appropriately priced mainly on the basis of the cost per square meter.
Judging (and pricing) an apartment primarily on the basis of its size, however, is not very logical — or, it’s so logical that it misses the larger point. An apartment can be small but charming, in a well-kept building in an awesome location. Indeed, this practice may be just a manifestation of the German tendency to quantify everything. Sometimes this is helpful–like in supermarkets, where nutrition facts are often exhaustively listed, not only “per serving” but per 100 grams. Other times, it just seems silly–like in advertisements, where companies that list phone numbers are seemingly required to state how much a call to that number is going to cost the reader. So, too, with apartments. The Germans may be missing the forest because they’re busy counting the trees.
