The Club of Good Tenants

I.The Situation

A good apartment now draws hundreds of applications. And a custom has crept in that we hold to be wrong: even the non-binding request for a viewing arrives with salary statements, bank records and self-disclosures attached - handed to strangers, into inboxes where nobody knows who reads them, where they are kept, or when they are deleted.

It is like a concert where everyone stands up: no one sees any better. Whoever sends out thirty dossiers gains no advantage - they lose time, data and a piece of self-determination. And on the other side of the table sits a landlord whom this flood helps just as little: thirty dossiers do not answer the one question that actually occupies them - who fits this apartment.

This is the state of affairs that Sumia refuses to accept.

II.A Surprise

I wrote my doctoral thesis on secrecy - more precisely, on its ambivalence in democratic theory. The familiar account runs in one direction only: democracy lives on transparency, and what is hidden is suspect. The work taught me the opposite, at least by half: democratic society, too, needs the private in order to function well. Citizens who must lay themselves open to every authority - every agency, every platform, every collection of data - do not become more self-determined through it, not even more recognisable. They become available. And the flood deceives the one who gathers it as well: when the Wall came down I was eleven - ever since, mountains of files make me think of the Stasi, which knew everything about its citizens and for that very reason never understood them. Between people as between citizen and institution, the same holds true: trust does not arise from ever more disclosure, but from reliable procedures that can carry what is not shown.

When we began building Sumia, I had this in the back of my mind, but it was not the starting point. At first I was after something else: to ease the often confrontational relationship between tenants and landlords - for those who want that. Because this market has grown strange: it lets both sides lose. People cannot find an apartment - and at the same time private owners would rather leave apartments empty than entrust them to strangers. That is not a price problem. It is a trust problem.

Then we asked people in Hamburg what weighs on them most about looking for an apartment. One answer came back again and again: the lack of privacy. Not the competition, not the rejections - the feeling of having to surrender their own data over and over just to be seen at all.

That was when I realised, with some astonishment, that we had long been building the thesis of my dissertation. Looking for an apartment is the everyday case of this ambivalence: a procedure that demands complete exposure and does not even return trust for it. So we moved privacy to the centre - and Sumia changed itself in the process. We have remained a club, but a democratic one, not an exclusive one: the threshold is a procedure anyone can pass through in good faith - not a circle you are born into, and not a price only some can pay. Sumia is a company, and we live on our members' contributions. But we earn our living by making people more sovereign - not by making them give themselves away. Since that became clear to me, the work feels different: less like a business model with a stance, more like a stance with a business model.

III.What Sumia Is

Sumia is a curated club for tenants who enter into two commitments. The first: careful treatment of the apartment - to live in it, look after it, preserve it, and return it in good order. The second: in conflict, the conversation comes first - whether it concerns a service-charge statement or the landlord's own need for the property.

Every member has their own profile at a fixed, permanent address. It shows what is documented nowhere else: verified identity, proven housing reputation - home by home, each one confirmed by the landlord who lived through it - and the confirmation that the intended rent is comfortable to carry, up to a limit the member sets themselves and states in the profile. None of it appears as a figure: whoever reads the profile learns that it holds - not what someone earns.

The profile belongs to the member. It travels with them, from apartment to apartment, from city to city - like a LinkedIn profile for renting: every year, every confirmed chapter makes it more substantial. It is not a document you create once and forget. It is a possession that matures - precisely in the years when you don't need it.

Sumia confirms where a member has lived and lives, that they carry the rent comfortably up to their self-set limit, and what they have committed to. Sumia does not rate, awards no points and keeps no rankings. A member is confirmed, or they are not a member - there is nothing in between to grade. Confirmed, not rated.

IV.How the Profile Travels

Before the viewing, our members send no personal documents. What a landlord sees is the confirmation - released by the member themselves, for this one recipient, for a limited time, revocable at any moment. Whoever can grant access and withdraw it is no supplicant. They are the host of their own data.

And when it becomes serious, the member of course presents their documents - as originals, before signing, to the one landlord who becomes theirs. Not as a scan to thirty. The binding examination of the documents remains with the landlord, and so does the decision.

What falls away is the scattering: no more salary statements in thirty strangers' inboxes, no copy of an ID card that nobody knows when it will be deleted. What remains is the care.

V.The Commitment

The club is above all a commitment one makes oneself. Nothing about it is sacrifice. It is a stance: reliability as a form of sovereignty.

It has two sides. The apartment: something entrusted to us, which we live in, care for and return in good order. And conflict: even a good tenancy knows friction - we meet it first in conversation, and where things stick, with a mediator, chosen by us from a pool that Sumia curates.

“First” here means first, not instead: this commitment takes no one's rights away, it orders the sequence. And it is voluntary, one-sided, our word - nothing is imposed on anyone else.

VI.The Threshold - and That It Holds

You do not become a member by filling in a form. Admission is a threshold: a personal conversation, a careful confirmation, a commitment you enter into. The measure is not where someone comes from or what they own - the measure is what they are prepared to commit to, and whether what they state holds up. Who someone is, they say themselves: in the conversation, and later in their own profile.

And the threshold does not lie behind you once you have crossed it. The commitments continue to apply - whoever breaks them loses their membership, and with it the profile. That is precisely where the value of the seal lies: it certifies no single day, it certifies a condition. Whoever shows a Sumia profile has kept their commitments to this day.

VII.What Sumia Does Not Do

Sumia does not broker apartments, does not advertise listings and never proposes anyone to a landlord - whoever sees a profile sees it solely because the member gave it to them. Sumia does not sell data and passes nothing on. And Sumia neither decides conflicts nor rates members: the confirmation is a procedure, not a verdict.

These limits are not modesty. They are the reason the seal can be trusted: a platform that does not live on brokerage has no interest in any particular transaction - only in the lasting standing of its members.

VIII.The Place

You can become a member anywhere. The profile, the proven housing reputation, sovereignty over your own data - all of it is the same in Munich as in Hamburg, in Leipzig as in Cologne.

Only one thing has a place: the work on acceptance, and it begins in Hamburg. This is where the first places emerge that explicitly accept the profile as an application document. We carry this work into every further city as soon as there are members there. The members of a city come before its acceptance - not the other way around. Anyone who joins elsewhere today is not waiting for Sumia. They are the beginning of Sumia in their own place.

IX.What All of This Is For

We believe that reliability may be visible without anyone having to bare themselves for it. That privacy is not an obstacle to trust, but its condition. And that a market in which hundreds of strangers scrutinise one another cannot be the final state of things.

Sumia is built for people who understand commitment as a strength - and who want to appear as who they are: dependable, credible, recognisable. On their own terms.