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.
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…
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.
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.
And all of those people still need housing which is made more difficult when people own more properties than they need to live in.
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.
See, you pay us for the privilege of being considered as a candidate to pay us.
We’re missing some critical data here.
The price is really low. Not in a value proposition way but looking at minimum wage…
If you have an agent that drives to the rental property, talks to you let you in walks around with you for 15 minutes maybe
That’s $5 for 10 tours. That’s $0.50 per tour.
These have to be virtual tours, or VR tours. Or maybe the real first tired of getting stood up, or tired of people trying to see every property that exists without ever buying anything.
There’s something strange with that.
Low?! The price should be zero.
If you’re trying to sell a product, the last thing you want to do is create a barrier between potential customers and the sales pitch. Most people are going to look at the free homes first, and probably move into one of those before they pay a fee to see something they might not even want.
The only way this fee helps the company is if they have a monopoly on the area and people have no other choice than to pay to play.
we’re not missing anything. renters don’t pay for tours of units. that’s the landlords problem. this is just all kinds of fucked up.
They’re self tours. They’re forcing you to pay a pittance with a identifiable credit card (not a gift card) which gives them your billing address The name associated with your bank account and with a quick joint through Nexus you’re approximate credit score and amount of money you make.
At 50 cents a tour nobody’s making any money off of it they’re not even making enough money to pay for the internet connected lock they put on the door
50/c/tour using highly cacheable data is easily profitable. but profitability is a completely unrelated point. as you touched on briefly.
Which takes me back to: ‘this is just all kinds of fucked up’
The price at all is ridiculous. Touring a rental is a sales action. Yes you have to pay for someone to administer a tour, but that’s a cost of doing business. It’s also weird because you generally don’t pay to tour homes for purchase.
This is exactly it. It’s always been a risk of being an estate agent/real estate agent. You take on the up-front cost on the basis you will make it back overall in commission in the long term.
12 or so years ago, we were looking at rental properties. And not only was there none of this nonsense. They were finding extra properties to look at, in addition to the one(s) we asked for. They wanted to sell and understood they need to put in the time up-front to get that.
But, if you can get the seller AND the buyer to pay you for your services? Damn, is that a win for them?
there’s probably a commission system built-in to pay the value of a month’s rent or something to the ‘agent’ when you sign a lease. which means, of course, they’re financially motivated to steer you to better paying properties (for them), not better units or locations for you.
One month rent was the going rate for a real estate agent to fill a rental for you in my area 6 months ago. Paid by the landlord/property owner
That’s only a $0.50 per visit charge for their more expensive option. There aren’t enough hours in the day for tours to make a reasonable amount of cash out of that that’s my problem.
If you chose the unlimited they could be getting pennies a visit out of it. It’s not enough to pay anybody anything even these system that they’re running. It purely has to be for information gathering to whoever’s paying the bill.
It’s real.
I take issue with the phrase “landlords don’t need to lift a single finger”
I’m in the process of selling my house (in the UK) right now so I can move to somewhere cheaper. We have people coming round to view it on maybe a twice- or thrice-weekly basis. I don’t even know their names. The estate agent (American: “realtor”) handles all of that. I just get a phone call telling me they’ve got someone who wants to come and view at X date and time, all I have to do is say yes or no then arrange to not be home. It’s all included in the frankly breathtaking sum I’m paying the estate agent.
I can’t imagine rental properties are different in any meaningful way.
Ah, there it is It’s a self tour. Thanks for the link, super helpful.
They’re getting your payment information, and the home address went to your bank. They’re logging where you’re going in case you’re doing something unspeakable. And they’re probably taking that information and getting a Nexus lookup on you for approximate credit scores and income.
Or maybe the real first tired of getting stood up, or tired of people trying to see every property that exists without ever buying anything.
Those sound like “cost of doing business” as a landlord/management agent.
It’s a self-tour system they’re gathering information on the customers
Why are they charging customers then?
If you wanted to get a customer’s home address and name to do a Nexus lookup asking them for their name and their home address could net you anything
But requiring a small charge on a credit card gives you At least the address on record with a bank for whoever the cardholder is and whatever their legal name is.
I’m not buying it. Your explanation doesn’t defend the $11.99 “product” and you can do an Auth on a credit card and get that same info without doing a Settle which actually takes money from the person. At worst, you could say its a refundable deposit, but its not that either. This is simply a cash grab charging for something that was included for free before.
I’m not defending the product. I’m trying to figure out why a 50-cent max tour fee makes any fucking sense.
If you do auth on a credit card without settling they could give you anybody’s credit card. You could have kids filling it out, this is an online service. But that’s small charge showing up on your card bill means somebody’s going to see it.
They’re making sure that you at least give basic information that’s valid in case you are stealing things we’re hiding out the apartment to rape the next tour. There’s no one there to watch you It’s a self-guided tour.
Without a realtor there to watch you, They need some kind of protection or the insurance would be unreal.
No
You keep saying this. Is that better? Like what makes any of what they are doing ok?
Did i say anywhere that this is good or ok? you all seem to be reading in between some lines that aren’t there and echoing off each others baseless accusations.
Nothing about your original comment reads as anything but defending that practice. Everything you said is factual, and it all sounds like defense. I appreciate that you laid out all the information that you did, but it reads like you’re saying “just playing devil’s advocate” when you’re just trying to spin a narrative that this is ok when that isn’t reality.
for appreciating it, you certainly have downvoted every comment I made here.
You are free express these bootlicker opinions, we are free to respond to them.
You sure? Cause nothing about what you’re talking about is critical. Part of being a renter is the cost associated with showing units and convincing people to buy. You’re lucky enough to have the capital to own rental property that’s essentially passive income. If you don’t want to put in the effort to show a unit to a potential tenant, then sell the real estate and fuck off with your money.
“Oh, you’re interested in a desktop PC? It cost us money to power it on and show how well it runs while playing games or using it as a workstation. So to cover that cost we’re going to have to charge you $5 to mess around with a display model.”
“Test drive a used car on our lot? You’re using 5 minutes of fuel and wearing the tires so $5 please.”
“Welcome to your local shopping mall. It costs us money to keep the place cool in the summer and we’re tired of people coming in and not buying something so to make sure we recapture that cost, we’re charging $5 at the door.”
FOOH
Yeah, gone forbid they ask you for a way that ends up giving them your legal name and your home address and a likelihood of your credit rating No one would ever want that for a rental system. /s
FOOH Right back at you.
You do that when you submit an application, not when you are just looking. Those details are none of their business if I have a look and decide no.
I agree completely. I’m not saying that it’s a good system I’m just trying to figure out how they were doing anything useful with a 50-cent charge for a tour.
It’s only 50 cents if you’re looking at 10 other properties managed by the same service. In practice, it’s $5 if you were only looking to tour a single place.
The problem I have with it is, if they’re trying to make money from it, the price is way too low. It’s not like a single unit is going to roll in the rent for a month in perspective visits. Letting a practically unvetted person remotely into an apartment that could steal things or hide out in a closet and rape someone… just the insurance to cover that alone would eat up a tremoundous amount of the fee. Cellular lockboxes are hundreds of dollars a piece.
If it was about money, it would need to be $20 for a single tour on a grand scale to make fiscal sense.
That’s why I think they’re just using it to harvest your data, that’s worth WAY more than $20 to them.
It’s not only to harvest your data to sell, it’s also to know how high the initial rent can be set (before you even see a property). That’s called an unfair advantage.
What the hell are you on about? Renters accompany prospective buyers on tours or walk throughs. No one is doing remote tours.
If you have an agent that drives to the rental property, talks to you let you in walks around with you for 15 minutes maybe
Half the time they just send you a (usually wrong) door code or tell you to knock on the door and ask the existing tenants.
But also, the onus to pay a broker should NEVER be on the renter. That’s a transaction between the broker and the landlord. If a landlord can’t afford a broker they can show the place themselves. If a renter can’t afford a broker they’re locked out of the transaction altogether.
You’re missing the point, which is that estate agents already get paid by the landlord for this. Charging renters is just extra money for doing what they already did.
And in sane places it doesn’t happen, and is often illegal.
Do the unlimited and have constant tours for all 30 days. Get friends to individually do the same. Pester the ever living fuck out of them.
r/maliciouscompliance
Oops, bad habit.¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You should make a Lemmy alternative. Could become useful, you know, with all the ongoing fascism.
Just had to do this a few weeks ago. They have you taken a pic of your driver’s license, provide your SSN & run a credit check on the spot. Then they charge you to tour the place.
A very “fuck you, I’m getting paid regardless” mentality from rental companies.
My wife and I were looking at realtors and one told us we would need to provide our credit card info to look at properties, and I just laughed and said “go fuck yourself” and hung up.
The only valid response, IMO.
The fact that people actually pay this shit is infuriating.
I had someone actually try to get me to pay to see rental property well. Mine were a little mote greedy and wanted $30.
I told them I work too hard for my money to be handing it out like party favors.
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.
Hah what are you going to do, buy a house instead? We’re all fucked once this is the norm.
I don’t know if this applies in the US but multiple people can take out a mortgage against the same property. If you have 3/4 trustworthy friends then you can pool your money to buy a place. It’s complicated but better to invest your money in your own property than to line the pockets of cunt landlords and letting agents.
Co-ownership is kind of a horrible idea overall. What happens when one of the 4 people wants to use the property as collateral for a loan?
Not to mention that this promotes increase in property costs without fixing the issue. If the norm is to continue pooling money between individuals then real estate can continue to raise prices. Then you just need 6 friends 10 friends 14 friends etc. we need a market crash and we need corporate residential ownership to be heavily regulated.
wants to use the property as collateral for the loan
Nothing major honestly. If they default, they would lose their stake in the claim. Since they don’t own the entire house, the bank couldn’t foreclose but they could assume ownership of their portion of the loan. The bank would view it more like a financial instrument rather than a real property.
Millions of tiny houses isn’t the worst idea.
From experience, basically no banks take collateral on co-owned homes. You probably won’t run into problems like that specifically. You can also easily structure an agreement with a lawyer. In many states you have to have an attorney to buy a home anyway (CT, MA, GA, DE, KY, LA, MD, MI, NH, ND, OK, RI, VT, WV, WO). We used ours to write and tack on the equivalent of an HOA arrangement you’d see in a condominium for our shared rooms.
I do find it amusing we have redditors arguing landlords should be illegal and others arguing co-ownership is a bad idea. Yes, let’s build millions of single room houses for everyone who is single that span the entire continent.
More apartments, town houses and better residential and commercial integration communities would help a lot
Going full neet and building endless and countless single person dwellings and nothing else with no other changes is beyond stupid tho.
Create a trust instead.
Contact an attorney to draft a trust where you all share equity at an amount you all agree to. The terms of the trust should indicate how someone sells their interest and what happens upon default, etc.
The trust buys the property and owns it. Ownership is managed through the trust.
The hardest part is qualifying for a loan. You’re essentially operating as a business and most home loans are designed for people and couples.
And bam, new laws come out that makes it illegal for more than X people who aren’t related to each other to share a home.
This is actually a thing in many places so people can’t do what you just described, isn’t American Freedumb so beautiful
This is called tenency in common. I’m unaware of it being illegal in any states and a cursory search brought up nothing. Do you have any leads you can share?
I searched “illegal for more than X people who aren’t related to each other to share a home” and came up with quite a bit.
I imagine many of those are ordinances intended to regulate fraternities and sororities—or similar college student shared housing situations.
LOL, look up “brothel laws”. :)
Stop searching using the correct legal term
Literally no one talks like that, and thus no articles will pull up. Use normal words.
A search using normal people words pulls up endless articles and links on Google on this topic.
I did use “normal people words”, you just assumed otherwise for no apparent reason. That’s how I found the correct legal term.
Can you provide any of these endless articles and links? All I could find is articles explaining how to do it with no mention of any restrictions.
“You no one use right word, too big. Use small normal word like me, me big big smart, good Google hunter. Me find many result. No end.” Seralth reaches into his loincloth, scratches his scrotum, then vigorously snuffles at his fingertips, oblivious of the glob of spittle making its way down his dirt smeared chin.
Yours has to be the most American comment I’ve seen this morning. BTW, you’re literally using literally incorrectly.
That would require people to have three to four close friends that could tolerate their presence. That’s an exceedingly rare thing in the US as we’re mostly all intolerable cunts.
Not to mention 3 or 4 ppl that can and will reliably make mortgage payments for 15 or more likely 30 years. Once someone drops out because of life then they’ll want to be bought out by the next person which introduced a whole bunch of headaches. Having watched this exact thing play out, this will most likely turn into a bitter nightmare of endless paperwork and some ruined relationships.
Also, it would require every friend to have savings to put down a down payment and also credit good enough to actually qualify. That’s on top of finding 3 or 4 friends you’re willing to live with.
4 people with 5k each can get almost 20% down on a 350k propery. Thats pretty decent except in the most expensive cities
4 people with 5k each can get almost 20% down on a 350k propery
Do you think that 20% of $350k is about $20,000? I feel like I’m missing something important here .
Maybe first-time home buyer programs? But those are like 3% typically so it wouldn’t get you there and that’s before including closing costs, moving costs, and possible repairs.
Except they explicitly said “nearly 20%”. Which is blatantly false. Terrible at basic math. And this is why people will remain poor
350,000 x 0.20= 70,000
70,000 / 4 = 17,500
17,500 - 5000 = 12,500Each person would need 17,500 for a 20% down payment, 12,500 more than the 5000 quote.
Just people making passive income guys, nothing to see here.
We once heard of a service that would help us find a rental house. So we went there, had to pay for an appointment. Turns out they do nothing you cannot do yourself, and you pay a lot. They literally just put you in the system, which you can do yourself, and when you get a house through that system, which is free and from the government, they make you pay through the nose for that house.
Of course, since I am native in this country I have no need for a service like that. Turns out they mostly do this to people who don’t speak the language. I guess they offer a service, but their fees are excessive for what they do. They abuse the fact those people don’t know any better.
There’s lots of people making a profit from somebody else’s house finding misery and I hate it.
Sounds like France. There’s a whole industry of people charging a months rent or more just to make a few phone calls and assemble some basic documents. Not easy to rent a place by any means, but these providers do not offer a good value because they are not actually real estate agents.
my parent went through that service, except they were trying rent out the other house, they are rich by any means. but it was the same process the agents basically did nothing, just put your house in thier database thats it.
God I love capitalism. Insert SpongeBob shouting meme
This reminds me of the Italian websites that resell tickets for exhibits that can be purchased much cheaper directly from the exhibit’s actual website. The exhibit sites tend to be in Italian only or are more difficult to find.
In some cases, arson is morally perfectly justifiable.
