How a coder used ChatGPT to find an apartment in Berlin in 2 weeks after struggling for months

• Daniel Dippold, a founder and investor, used OpenAI's ChatGPT to find an apartment in 2 weeks.
• The 28-year-old used the AI to suggest alternatives to housing websites and automate the search process.

OpenAI's ChatGPT seems to have endless possible use cases as people flock to the technology to plan vacations, enhance their dating profiles, and even lose weight. One coder-turned-investor used the chatbot to find an apartment.

Daniel Dippold, the 28-year-old CEO and founder of venture capital firm EWOR, and his girlfriend had spent four months looking for an apartment to rent in Berlin with no success. German housing platforms like Immo Scout24, immowelt, and Immonet didn't offer units they liked, and when he turned to his network, there were no good leads.

"I got really worried because there was literally no one able to provide a flat," Dippold told Insider.

Then, Dippold, who began using OpenAI's ChatGPT and was soon "coding with it all the time," became inspired by the chatbot's capabilities. He wondered if he could use ChatGPT to secure an apartment.

"When I was really exhausted looking for a flat in Berlin, I figured, 'Hey, can I build something that makes it easier for me potentially with GPT?'" he wondered. It worked.

First, Dippold asked ChatGPT to suggest 20 things he could do to find an apartment using "a method that is a little more ingenious and tech-focused" than looking at online platforms. The chatbot spit out 20 options, including setting up automated alerts on housing websites and developing a machine-learning model to predict which areas have the best deals.

Some of these suggestions "inspired him," but many weren't practical, he said. As a result, he asked ChatGPT to generate 40 more suggestions. He zeroed in on his favorite: compiling a database of all the public and private property managers in Berlin to contact.

He liked this option because he could ask them if they have apartments that may soon be on the market to get ahead of the competition.

Next, he asked ChatGPT to build a web scraper — a tool that extracts data from websites — in Python that could create a database populated with the names of all the property managers in Berlin. The chatbot spit out a script, and after Dippold tweaked its code, the bot produced a database filled with more than 100 property management firms, each with multiple apartments that came with an address, location, phone number, and e-mail.

"That sped up the process even further," he said.

After that, he manually wrote emails in German — GPT is better in English, he says — to each management company on the list. He included contact information, as well as why he and his partner would be good tenants. He received 35 responses in just one day. Insider verified the process with screenshots of the chatbot's responses and with emails from housing authorities.

Since he didn't want to manually respond to each email, Dippold asked ChatGPT to generate code that would create automatic responses that would include personal documents like their passports and pay stubs. This meant the couple was able to send out their application materials before other prospective tenants.

He narrowed down the list to three units that his girlfriend later toured based on their preferred size, price, and location. Dippold and his girlfriend are now choosing between one of two apartments that accepted their applications thanks to ChatGPT.

Using the chatbot to find housing, Dippold said, was a "creative solution" that he found "faster" and "higher quality" than traditional modes of apartment hunting.

Still, Dippold admits the chatbot isn't perfect. Many of the solutions ChatGPT suggested, he said, were "absolute crap," such as creating a chatbot to talk to landlords and signing a lease without seeing the place in-person.

The AI only understood short prompts with little context, produced "buggy" code riddled with errors, and generated answers "that were just wrong."

Still, he was able to find workarounds by asking the bot follow-up prompts and drawing from his own coding expertise to fix bugs.

As a self-proclaimed digital nomad, there is no doubt he will use ChatGPT to find housing again in the future.

"I would definitely do this again," Dippold said.