Exclusive: The real estate platform Housing Anywhere has classified a criminal known to the police as an “excellent landlord”. Now he’s gone – and with him the bail of hundreds of people looking for an apartment. How could that happen?
Joaquin Alonso was actually looking forward to Germany. The 33-year-old Mexican wanted to move to Berlin in November for a marketing job at an IT company. The search for an apartment from afar was initially unsuccessful, so he looked around on the online platform Housing Anywhere. The Dutch proptech startup advertises the safe and fast placement of accommodation throughout Europe, without an inspection.
Alonso found a furnished one-room apartment with light-colored parquet flooring and a fitted kitchen in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Cost point: 980 euros rent including heating for almost 30 square meters. “I thought it was pretty expensive,” he says. But because he didn’t have much time left, he applied anyway.
Landlord disappears with bail
“Everything seemed normal at first,” Alonso recalls. The provider, one Leelly from Co-living Service, first asked for a copy of the ID and employment contract. She had a verified profile, the platform advertises her as an “excellent landlord” with more than 350 successful placements. The rental agreement also ran to a registered GmbH. That’s why Alonso wasn’t suspicious when Leely asked him to transfer the deposit of 2,600 euros directly to her company.
Three weeks before moving in, in the early hours of October 29, Alonso received a strange message from his supposed landlady. The co-living service has changed hands, it said. That’s why a few organizational things have to be clarified first. “Therefore, the collection will be delayed indefinitely,” writes the company. All payments would of course be returned.
Rip off in almost 200 cases
Alonso has not seen the money again to this day. The Co-living Service website has been offline since that Saturday, and no one is responding to calls and messages. Housing Anywhere has also not been able to contact the company so far. The startup is now assuming a suspected mass fraud.
“Unfortunately, we have apparently become the victim of criminal activities by a provider on our platform,” said a spokesman for Housing Anywhere on request. They have reason to believe that the company is insolvent and have now filed a criminal complaint.
According to Housing Anywhere, a total of 198 customers have been affected. Some should have moved in the day the company disappeared. Some stayed in hotels. Other victims were about to move. “I have no idea where to stay now,” says Tomás Pinho from Portugal, for example, who wanted to move to Berlin at the beginning of the year to study abroad.
Housing Anywhere advertised with security clearance
Alonso, who is currently sleeping on an improvised day bed with relatives in Berlin, is infuriated by the incidents. He clearly sees responsibility for the Housing Anywhere platform. “They told us that the provider was a very good landlord,” he says.
In fact, Housing Anywhere advertises particularly strong security measures on its website. “Our AI-powered algorithm keeps potential scammers at bay by detecting fraudulent listings within 5 minutes of their creation on the platform,” it says. Housing Anywhere describes itself as “Europe’s largest booking platform for rental accommodation”. According to its own statements, it mediated 96,000 rental agreements last year. The company has collected around 42 million US dollars in funding since it was founded and bought some competitors from the market, including the German platform Studenten-WG.
The startup’s business model is based on ensuring secure transactions. Finally, Housing Anywhere caters primarily to students and professionals from abroad who cannot or do not want to travel for viewings. With the investment in security, the startup also justifies the whopping service fee: Alonso had to pay a total of 245 euros for the placement services of Housing Anywhere. He has since got his fee back.
In the case of proptech itself, however, no one is aware of any guilt. We regret the incident but have no control over when transfers are made outside the platform. A background check was also done.
“The incident was not foreseeable, as we always check with our providers whether it is a properly registered company and we personally verify the people involved and their references,” said a spokesman for Housing Anywhere. At the beginning of the year, they also met with the representatives of Co-Living Service GmbH & Co. KG. No abnormalities were found. The company has been offering apartments since May 2021 without “relevant incidents” occurring.
Landlord is known to the police
However, how thorough this background check by Housing Anywhere was is debatable. According to research by Capital and Finance Forward, Cedric S., the managing director of the company that went into hiding, Co-living Service, has been known to the police for some time. His name appears, among other things, in a procedure for delaying bankruptcy. Last year there was a penalty order against his father Michael S., also a real estate entrepreneur, which was dropped again.
The father-son team has also often been noticed with dubious rentals. In Hamburg they are said to have rented rooms to refugees for 41 to 45 euros per square meter. Those who couldn’t pay were sent a gang of thugs. Cedric S. was investigated in 2019 for extortion and dangerous bodily harm. He is said to have threatened the defaulting tenants with a blank gun.
Tenant Protection Association warns against renting without inspection
Christoph Albrecht knows such and similar cases. The specialist lawyer for tenancy law advises the Berlin Tenant Protection Association on legal issues. “Unfortunately, I often see landlords taking advantage of the ignorance of foreign apartment seekers,” he says. In most cases, these are exorbitant rents. Offers like that of Joaquin Alonso, who should pay 980 euros for around 30 square meters, are “beyond good and bad and completely overpriced”.
On the other hand, the lawyer rarely has concrete cases of fraud on the table, since the persons concerned from abroad are often unfamiliar with German law. Either way, the prospects in these cases are not particularly rosy. “The money is probably gone now. I can only warn against transferring something unseen,” says Albrecht.
To this day, he doesn’t know whether Joaquin Alonso’s one-room apartment actually exists somewhere in Berlin. Some of the approximately 200 apartment advertisements that Capital and Finance Forward were able to see are illustrated with photos of real apartments from the portfolio of the brokerage firm Engel and Völkers. Upon request, the company informed our editors that they were not aware of Co-living Service GmbH & Co. KG. “From our point of view, it could well be a scam,” said one employee. Alonso is now firmly convinced of this. He – and dozens of other victims – have reported Cedric S. to the police.
