REFIRE
Berlin's proposed housing and rent register, Germany's first, is set to pass the House of Representatives on July 2 before the summer recess. The main committee approved the amendment on June 11, incorporating the register into the Housing Security Act. As REFIRE reported in Issue 256 (article here), the proposal has attracted fierce opposition from landlord associations and serious constitutional questions. The political momentum, however, now appears firmly behind it.
SPD parliamentary group leader Raed Saleh declared the legal reservations resolved. "This will create transparency in the rental market," he said, describing the register as a "paradigm shift in rental policy" and predicting that other federal states would follow Berlin's lead. The register will cover approximately 1.8 million rental agreements, requiring landlords to submit detailed tenancy data to a central digital platform maintained by the Senate Department for Urban Development and Housing. Updates must be reported within one month of any changes, while serious or repeated non-compliance can result in fines of up to €100,000.
The self-incrimination problem identified in the original draft, which would have forced landlords to choose between submitting data that could be used against them in criminal proceedings or facing fines for non-compliance, has been addressed through a procedural workaround rather than a structural solution. Landlords may now decline to disclose rent amounts, but that refusal will itself be flagged to the authorities, which can then obtain the information directly from tenants. Whether that satisfies constitutional requirements remains to be tested.
The enforcement context lends the register real teeth. Berlin's rent review office, the SiWo, has been operational since March 2025 and found excessive rents in more than 93% of cases it reviewed during its first six months. The first significant fine, nearly €50,000, was issued in October 2025 against a Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg landlord charging 190% above the local market rate.
For supporters of the register, those early enforcement results demonstrate why a broader database is needed. The aim is not simply to collect information, but to make enforcement more systematic. Instead of relying on tenants to identify potential breaches and file complaints, authorities would be able to compare rental data across the market and focus their attention on cases that stand out.
From rent complaints to data-driven enforcement
Opposition remains. The Greens, while supporting the principle, describe the current draft as the "lowest common denominator", criticising the failure to identify property owners who operate behind Luxembourg holding structures, the absence of vacancy data and the lack of a fixed identification number for each apartment to track ownership changes over time.
More significant than the immediate political debate may be the precedent Berlin is attempting to establish. If the system functions as intended, regulators will gain for the first time a comprehensive, continuously updated database covering almost every rental apartment in the city. Excessive rents could be identified systematically rather than through tenant complaints, allowing enforcement authorities to focus their resources on anomalies flagged by the data itself.
That prospect explains why supporters and opponents alike regard the proposal as far more than a data-collection exercise. Saleh has predicted that other federal states will eventually follow Berlin's lead. Critics, by contrast, see the register as the beginning of a much more interventionist approach to regulating rental markets.
For institutional investors, the compliance burden is likely to be manageable. Large residential landlords already maintain structured tenant and rent databases. The greater challenge may fall on smaller landlords and fragmented ownership structures with far less reporting and administrative infrastructure. It is worth noting, however, that the register is the moderate element of what the SPD has placed on the table: its broader programme includes capping profit distributions by housing companies, freezing base rents, introducing sale bans with a state right of first refusal, and exploring Article 15 of the Basic Law as the basis for a socialization mechanism.
Whether the courts ultimately approve the register or not, Berlin has already changed the terms of the debate. The question is no longer whether governments should have access to rental data, but how that data will be used once they possess it.