deleted by creator
If this weren’t such a huge red flag, I’d just knock on the door and pay the current tenant $5.
Might get a coffee out of it
Well I need the 24/7 phone and chat support. What if I have a question about my ability to tour a property at 2am?
It would be tempting to get that plan and call them at the stupidest hours possible. But it’s probably outsourced to India or just AI
It’s outsourced to what the company calls AI however it’s just some people in India. Everyone except for you is making money in that scenario.
In some cases, arson is morally perfectly justifiable.
I want to shit down the neck stump of whoever came up with this
What the actual fuck
Just more rent seeking behavior.
Last few months… Grifting has seriously accelerated
Companies have been accelerating their grifting at an alarming rate since the COVID days
shrinkflation, cheapflation really took off.
Indeed. They are using that floosing the zome tactic trump did with politics.
Sadly it appears to be working. Working class cant muster a back lash, they don’t know what to lash out at
i believe its russian, firehose of falsehood. going back to goebbels too.
We’re in the New Gilded Age
Why do we even need people to show us apartments. My best experience when looking for a my last apartment was a place that had a automated system, you scan your drivers license for verification, their app gives you the address and the time to visit, when you get there it gives you a lockbox code that will contain the keys to the apartment, you check the apartment out and return the keys to the lockbox on your way out, this should be the default for every rental apartment visit. Every agent I had to deal with was less than useful, this industry needs to die.
How do they defend against abuse? Like if someone steals a toaster on their visit how do you know if it was person 1 or person 5 who visited that day? Do they have to have someone to check after each visit? Why don’t they just do the viewing?
I assumed the apartments being showed were empty.
I’m talking about empty apartments and I assume someone comes to check up the state of the apartment once a day or more
It’s still a problem if someone leaves used needles or vomits on the carpet.
This has gotta be some NYC shit
In a region near me the rental market is 99.3% full.
Scumbag landlords charge $200 to view these horrid places no one will ever rent, and their job is showing people the place, one after another. It’s only a half-dozen a day, but that’s a good wage and there’s no end of hopefuls. Apparently, needing a landlord to come out to show you the place is a “call-out”, even if he’s just upstairs.
Of course that’s the “frbo” market; the rental companies can’t get away with that yet. They wish, though.
In a region near me the rental market is 99.3% full.
I hear that from every landlord in every market, whether the economy is booming or shrinking and people are coming or going.
I have never been quoted an occupancy rate less than 90%. I’ve been in buildings under construction and heard “Yes, we’ve already leased most of our units! You’re getting the last ones! So lucky!”
Well if you have 5 vacant units artificial scarcity is pretty easy to achieve by only putting one to market at a time.
Ding ding ding
The same is done with commercial property too. Holding out (or more correctly, withholding a property entirely) vacant for X months is more profitable overall as it keeps the supply low for office/light industrial space, driving the same demand to fewer units until ✨ a
newly renovatedunit ✨ is available on the market.Until X months inoccupancy exceeds the profit of Y units generating Z extracted profit each, they come out ahead. And not even ‘we covered the mortgage and local tax’ ahead of break even, but the potential earnings if all were listed and rented.
They literally make more money keeping housing vacant. And that needs to change.
Wait so the people who refuse to go with those big companies (aren’t there principled folks like that, maybe they have a name I’m forgetting) have to deal with that instead?
It was like people who have to pay some fee I thought… searches oh it’s the no broker fee people. So do no broker fee ppl often pay viewing fees? And viewing fees are legal?
Rents are too high for a single income to cover anymore, so I’ve been looking for roommates. Even the websites about finding roommates expect you to pay.
To be clear, they have a free tier - but unless you pay, you can’t read the messages you receive. You can read the first line, but the rest is locked. I gave up with one place because the boomer trying to rent a room refused to send me an email. I told him three times to please just email me his message because I couldn’t read it on the site, but because he could read messages fine, he thought it was a setting he had to change. He kept responding with “Okay try now” and didn’t seem to understand that he can’t “settings” other people out from behind a paywall.
All he had to do was copy/paste his message and send it a different way, but he wouldn’t do it. I eventually gave up because the thought of living with someone that’s unable to follow such simple directions sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.
Anyway, point is, even if you’re so poor that you need to seek out roommates, you’re still expected to pay a subscription. I don’t even know what to do anymore.
If you were replying with an email address odds are he was not getting it due to the site actively trying to keep people on their site.
Absolutely. A site charging to read messages will most definitely censor out emails and phone numbers and will have it in their ToS that you’re not allowed to take conversations outside the platform.
Probably. Not much I can do. I’m not paying for a subscription. If anyone has any advice for finding roommates otherwise, I would very much appreciate it!
Why did people stop using craigslist to advertise rentals?
It is just the old bulletin board / classified newspaper niche, usually there’s more than one venue in urban areas. In a lot of Canada people also use kijiji etc. I am not including fb marketplace in that, though if you can access Meta websites, too many people still use that.
Craigslist probably doesn’t have enough empty space and rounded corners for most people. I’m not joking.
still waiting for design fashion to circle back to gopher and tabular data… taps fingers and sighs in genX
Scammers go to fb marketplace over Craigslist because meta is slow to react if at all, while Craigslist is known to easily and freely offer information to law enforcement.
Yes, friends don’t let friends use Meta products.
Seriously, could get you stabbed in a police station parking lot or something…
That is a possibility with nearly any classified listing and always has been.
Situational awareness and good street sense are necessary. Bring a friend or be as public as you can, etc.
Most online scams, including phishing and tech support scams, are variations on ancient techniques.
Thank you so much! Craigslist is something I had completely forgotten about. I dropped off Facebook years ago and unfortunately don’t live in Canada, but Craigslist is a great suggestion and I’m perusing it now. You may have just saved me from living in my car (again.)
Seriously, thank you!
You go! Also check for more niche classified sites, like specific to universities etc.
A client at work which is a local property management company (big enough to have 2 part time employees and one full time property maanger) lists all of their properties on Craigslist as well as many more commercial sites, so it’s not just mom and pops on there
Edit: another option is to call up a given property during business hours to ask about availability. Chances are your call will go to the property management company and they’ll have more properties than just the one building you saw the number on
What is this app actually called? I can’t id it from screenshot, and every comment here seems to be talking about it without actually naming it.
Sounds like a market ready for disruption
In the romulan disruptor kind of way?
Isn’t this what Craigslist is for?
I’ve had decent luck with CL in the past for rentals, but understand that it’s generally: an illegal listing (eg no windows or the like for fire egress), sex traffickers targeting desperate women, or scammers - and you need to be able to jump on the legit leads ASAP.
But yes as a renter, sifting through Craigslist was vastly preferable to paying whatever some private equity firm decided “market rates” are (we are the market, teehee 🤭) for a hovel in a 1+5 complex, or dealing with the myriad of cutouts that paywall listings or communications like the OP.
At least with Craigslist you know its not the platform scamming you or helping to scam you. Solid website.
Mao did one thing right
Died?
Decrease the surplus population?
Solved the housing crisis by lowering demand! It’s cheaper and easier!
It’s weird to see people pile on Mao for a massive regional famine but blink right past the Rape of Nanjing.
Extra surreal when you know how many millions Chang-Kei Shek butchered before he was forced off the mainland.
Even more so when you consider the explosion in wealth and prosperity enjoyed by a country that ended the 1940s with 400M people and entered the 2000s with 1.3B
This, as Western nations in the current decade have engineered famines from Haiti to Libya to Gaza to Afghanistan.
Ah yes, every time someone points out how bad Mao was as an authoritarian dictator, that’s “piling on”, even when it’s only one person.
What does Nanjing have to do with a comment about Mao?
How are “Western nations” relevant to this conversation at all?
I hope you stretch before you jump into these mental gymnastics, you might strain something.
What does Nanjing have to do with a comment about Mao?
The fact that you have to ask…
See, you pay us for the privilege of being considered as a candidate to pay us.
Nobody tell OP about rental application fees, they’ll explode.
This is 100% worse, though. Both should come with being shot in the street as punishment but at least application fees is paying for something you want and not paying to see if you even want it at all.
If we can get people to do it near landlords we might fix the system
…or we could raise our children to not be landlords.
Is this real?
This is wild, but I have at least one guess where they might be coming from with this idea.
At one point I had to move out of a house that I owned for a while so I wanted to let it.
People who want to rent can be super flaky and dishonest. Seriously 4 out of 5 or more are like this.
They make appointments then don’t show up and ghost you. Or they call 5 minutes late to say they’ll be there in 3 hours.
Or everything seems good until you do credit checks and find they were evicted from the last place and haven’t made a payment on their credit card for 3 years plus they have a felony conviction from a few years ago for beating up some guy.
Or when checking their income is sufficient, their boss says yeah, they used to work here but not anymore.
Potential renters never tell you this stuff until you already put hours into talking and going out to show the place to them.
I’m just a regular guy with a job (who does pay his bills) so this takes a lot of time, fuck that noise.
Basically charging people $5 will make them not come if they know they won’t qualify, saving everybody the time.
If it’s so much work for you, sell the house. It’s not like you’re living in it. Income takes work. It sounds like you want people to just give you money while you’re not working.
From the renters perspective they have the risk of paying money to find out that the rental post was misleading, the location is crappy, etc. on top of their wasted time.
Charging for an application that involves paying a third party to process? Sketchy, but understandable.
Charging for them to even look at the property? Ridiculous.
If it’s mealy five buck, refundable on contract fee to weed out the unserious, I’m fine with that. Look at your own example, “location is crappy”. That’s on the person looking if they couldn’t figure that out ahead of time. I can see a rental post being misleading, but having rented a dozen or so places, never seen anything unexpected.
Ever sold anything on FaceBook Marketplace? Do NOT put anything out there for free. You’ll be overrun by assholes, just as in the post you’re replying to. If you charge $5 or $10, those people actually show up.
I agree, shitty landlords exist as well and try to scam people into coming. That’s why I’ll never rent out a place again, on either side, if I can avoid it.
Boo fucking hoo it requires a bit of work to be a landlord.
And all of those people still need housing which is made more difficult when people own more properties than they need to live in.
So, I think a decade or so ago (maybe more), the bigger corpos went full mask off, and stopped even pretending they cared about anything but making more money. Screw the employees, screw the customer, screw the regulatory departments. Money only.
It seems this is filtering down to more and more businesses.
I am not sure how it is over there. Here in the UK the number of rental properties has dropped drastically. I suspect, it’s because of a few changes legally here that make it not quite so lucrative to buy-to-let any more. In any case, rather than bring house prices down, it just made the rentals still on the market go up in price. As an example today for my postcode there are over 80 properties for sale (excluding retirement/shared properties) and only around 10 for rent with the same filters. It used to be closer to half the number of rental properties up until around 5 or so years ago.
If there’s a seller’s (well landlord’s/renter’s I guess) market, they could for sure make people pay to get an edge on gaining an increasingly rare rental. It’s downright scummy. But, I expect nothing less any more.
