Wunderflats

Say hello to Wunderflats, Germany's No. 1 platform for temporary furnished housing, and the newest company running on Steep. Berlin-based Wunderflats connects tenants and landlords for furnished stays of a month or more, across Germany and a growing number of European cities. Behind it: a small data team, around 600 dbt models in BigQuery, and 150 people across the business who need answers from that data. Earlier this year Wunderflats made a call a lot of companies are debating right now. They didn't renew Tableau and connected Claude straight to BigQuery instead, going AI-first without a semantic layer in between. As Manu Kumar, Senior Data Engineer at Wunderflats, put it: "We didn't have one definition of anything. Ask the same question twice and Claude could give you two different answers, because it was writing new SQL from scratch every time. And as we invest more in agentic development, one set of definitions goes from good to have to necessary." The team benchmarked it themselves: with a semantic layer in between, the same questions took 80 to 90 percent fewer tokens. Wunderflats is now rolling out Steep as the governed layer between BigQuery and Claude. Every metric is defined once, in code, so all 150 people get the same governed answer. Behdad Nayebi, Business Intelligence Lead at Wunderflats, describes it as "much better than Claude Artifacts. Easier to share, easier to maintain." Welcome, Wunderflats.

Short-term or mid-term? Why choose when you can manage both? 🏡 We’re excited to announce our new integration with Wunderflats, giving Hostify property managers another way to diversify their rental strategy and reach guests looking for furnished mid-term stays. 🌍 As demand for flexible living continues to grow, property managers need the flexibility to adapt their portfolios, explore new markets, and reduce their dependence on a single rental model. 📈 With Wunderflats now connected to Hostify, you can bring mid-term rentals into the same ecosystem you already use to manage your short-term rental business. 🔄 One portfolio. More ways to rent it. 💡 Welcome to the Hostify ecosystem, Wunderflats! 🤝 👉 Learn more about the integration: https://lnkd.in/ekDepQ3w #Hostify #Wunderflats #MidTermRentals #ShortTermRentals #PropertyManagement #PropTech #VacationRentals

Housing policy is moving fast in Germany right now, and the details will shape flexible housing for years. In the August issue of Zeitwohnen Update, our CEO Jan Hase looks at three developments: the new transparency rules for furnishing surcharges, Berlin's administrative rules for social preservation areas, and the debate around a citywide rental registry. Read the full newsletter here:

Germany ranks among the top destinations for international skilled workers. The housing market does not behave accordingly. A recurring pattern: an international professional arrives for a fixed-term assignment. The employer covers housing. The timeline is clear. What is not clear is what "ready to move in" actually means in Germany. No kitchen. A furniture buyout from the previous tenant. Additional costs disclosed only at the viewing. Document requirements no one communicated upfront. This is not a niche problem. It affects engineers on industrial projects, researchers on secondments, and entire relocation programmes run by large employers. When housing logistics fail, project starts are delayed and employer trust erodes. The bottleneck is transparency. International professionals are asking for a clear answer to three questions: what is included, what does it cost in total, and what do I need to bring. Germany has a real opportunity to close this gap. If Germany wants to attract international talent, the housing market needs to keep up. What is your experience with housing for international hires?

€800 million in economic value can depend on something as simple as a registered address. On Tuesday, Berliner Morgenpost covered the debate around temporary housing in Berlin. I was glad to share Wunderflats’ position. The criticism is real. Some apartments are rented at prices that go too far. Some people take advantage of those who have very few alternatives. We take that seriously and actively work to prevent abuse on our platform. Because behind every booking, there is a real tenant with their very own story: People are coming to Berlin from abroad for a job, a research project, or a fixed-term assignment. Others are leaving a difficult situation at home or seeking refuge. In all of these situations, housing is the first step toward a functioning life. And a registered address is what makes everything else possible: insurance, a bank account, a Schufa score. Only 1% of German apartments are rented out temporarily. 150,000 of 23 million. Temporary housing is not the cause of Berlin’s housing crisis. We commissioned an ifo study to find out what a ban would actually do. The result: landlords would not convert their apartments to long-term rentals. They would sell or leave them empty. The supply problem would not improve. And Berlin would lose roughly 800M EUR in economic value. Berlin needs more housing. It also needs a functioning transitional layer for people arriving to fill the jobs that are already here. Both things are true. They need to be solved together. You can find the link to the article in the comments.