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.
What the actual fuck
Last few months... Grifting has seriously accelerated
Companies have been accelerating their grifting at an alarming rate since the COVID days
But you suuuurely tip when you look at a rental?
There’s a 20% suggested tip on the $250 non refundable application deposit?
$250 non refundable application deposit?
LMAO I'd sooner torch the rental property than pay just to APPLY to hopefully live there.
If they nickel and dime simple visitors like that, I can only imagine what they do to the people who actually rent the place.
If this weren’t such a huge red flag, I’d just knock on the door and pay the current tenant $5.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 has gotta be some NYC shit
Why would they sell/rent when they make so much money on tours?
I mean really just spruce up one unit, charge for tours, charge for applications, why even bother renting?
I mean places already charge just to submit an app.
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.
See, you pay us for the privilege of being considered as a candidate to pay us.
This is why I'll boondock until its completely illegal. Then if they don't force me into the gray pod then I'm going feral hobo until I die in a fight with a racoon over some berries.
I’m going feral hobo until I die in a fight with a racoon over some berries.
Stop, my brother! We are not enemies! There is enough berry for all, if we but put down our differences and turn our attention to the dreaded hording bourgeois!
agencies: "housing is just not unaffordable enough. I wonder what else we can do to contribute?"
I want to shit down the neck stump of whoever came up with this
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.
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.
In some cases, arson is morally perfectly justifiable.
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?
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.
Edit: someone linked the actual site theyre self tours, they're using the payment to collect data on the prospective tenants. Forcing you to pay with a non-gift card credit card means they get enough information to do a Nexus lookup on you.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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