Berlin apartment hunting

Before we moved to Berlin, we were under the impression it would be easy as pie to find an apartment here. We only booked accommodation for three nights, optimistically. When we got here, we sat down at a cafe with free w-lan (wifi), opened our laptops and didn't know what to do. There only seemed to be a few new apartments posted a day, and we had skimmed through them in a half hour. And we didn't have any apartments to go view, even if we tried to reply to adverts. These are the websites we found useful:

http://berlin.de.craigslist.org/apa
http://berlin.de.craigslist.org/sub
http://kleinanzeigen.zitty.de
www.toytowngermany.com/forum/index.php?showforum=225
www.studenten-wg.de
www.immobilienscout24.de/
www.immowelt.de
www.wg-gesucht.de

People also glue posters on traffic light poles about looking for tenants. Answer as many ads as possible by texting, calling and emailing. Don't be picky, because you never know. It's likely that you will be most disappointed by the best sounding places. We found our apartment based on a one sentence ad without pictures. Texting was most efficient for us. Some language skills are necessary, except perhaps when dealing with Craigslist and Toytown. On Immoscout24 and on Immowelt you can set up searches that alert you when new adverts that match your criteria are added. We didn't find them very helpful, mostly because we were not looking for a one year lease, which is the standard, and we preferred furnished apartments. Craigslist has many scam ads, so beware. Before replying to the ads I googled the email address "in quotation marks", and many of them came up on scam lists.

I hope this helps.