9 ms·

What's worse is they also employ high pressure sales tactics to get tenants to settle asap. Young professionals and students moving to the city for the first ti

by spyspy 5y ago

What's worse is they also employ high pressure sales tactics to get tenants to settle asap. Young professionals and students moving to the city for the first time are their bread and butter, along with people who decided to end their current lease and have 30 short days to find a new spot. While searching for my current apartment, I was month-to-month on my previous NYC lease and was therefore 1) not a complete noob to the city and 2) could be super picky and I kept getting the sense brokers had no patience for someone like me.

listenallyall 5y ago
Not sure why you are surprised or annoyed by this. It doesn't matter what you sell, aren't you going to avoid the self-described "super picky" customer? Salespeople work on volume, a customer like you is a time suck with limited probability of resulting in a sale. You're welcome to be as selective as you like, but certainly don't expect salespeople to want to deal with you.
- caddemon 5y ago
  "Customer" is an interesting word choice for someone who receives literally 0 value from the agent. Especially now with the internet, but even before with school/work connections, the majority of students/transplants will find their own apartment. They then have to pay the broker fee to whatever agent their chosen landlord has decided to use, in exchange for being a middleman with paperwork. Many of the prospective tenants do not even find out about this until it is time to officially apply! Since there is usually a deadline to find an apartment, and most apartments will have (proportionally) the same exact fee, the "customer" is really a captive. Ironically, the person you are replying to tried to actually be a customer with the agent, but since these people have no need to sell apartments (they will sell themselves in NYC and Boston), you're right - why bother? The real key is to become buddies with a few landlords, that's where to spend time.
  - listenallyall 5y ago
    "Especially now with the internet," can you show me a service that doesn't extract its own fee when connecting buyers and sellers?
    - caddemon 5y ago
      The agent isn't the one doing the connecting, that's my point. Most landlords I know "write" their own listings using a standard template and reusing old photos. Circulating this is trivial, especially in a hot housing market. A few of the landlords I know are older and will pass the info to an agent to paste into popular sites. But I'd hardly call that "connecting" and certainly not worth thousands of dollars. Additionally, the landlords will often give first dibs to internal housing sites for local universities or to other current tenants to spread to their network. So it frequently doesn't even require posting on a public site, and in these cases the agent only becomes involved in the situation when it is time to fill out the rental app. This is especially common when people move for grad school or choose to stay after undergrad and want to live near their peers/friends. So you can imagine the sheer amount of money that gets collected for 0 return in Boston. I'm not against real estate agent commissions in general obviously, but the way rental brokerage fees work is an absolute scam in parts of the US.
      - tdeck 5y ago
        This whole discussion is so bizarre to me, since I've only been a tenant in the SF Bay Area. We don't seem to have brokers here, or at least I've never heard of them. If the landlord pays a property manager or realtor to show the place, that's, on their end and not an additional fee (in fact, non-refundable deposits are illegal in SF). Some people who are used to this broker system seem to assume it *must" be adding some value but I can attest that it doesn't.
        listenallyall 5y ago
        > it *must" be adding some value but I can attest that it doesn't And yet, landlords keep using it. A $2500/month apt in NYC will cost $34,500 the first year -- but only $30,000 goes to the landlord. Can you help explain why a landlord would freely give up $4500 (standard 15% fee) in potential revenue?

by spyspy 5y ago

listenallyall 5y ago

Not sure why you are surprised or annoyed by this. It doesn't matter what you sell, aren't you going to avoid the self-described "super picky" customer? Salespeople work on volume, a customer like you is a time suck with limited probability of resulting in a sale. You're welcome to be as selective as you like, but certainly don't expect salespeople to want to deal with you.

caddemon 5y ago
"Customer" is an interesting word choice for someone who receives literally 0 value from the agent. Especially now with the internet, but even before with school/work connections, the majority of students/transplants will find their own apartment. They then have to pay the broker fee to whatever agent their chosen landlord has decided to use, in exchange for being a middleman with paperwork. Many of the prospective tenants do not even find out about this until it is time to officially apply! Since there is usually a deadline to find an apartment, and most apartments will have (proportionally) the same exact fee, the "customer" is really a captive. Ironically, the person you are replying to tried to actually be a customer with the agent, but since these people have no need to sell apartments (they will sell themselves in NYC and Boston), you're right - why bother? The real key is to become buddies with a few landlords, that's where to spend time.
- listenallyall 5y ago
  "Especially now with the internet," can you show me a service that doesn't extract its own fee when connecting buyers and sellers?
  - caddemon 5y ago
    The agent isn't the one doing the connecting, that's my point. Most landlords I know "write" their own listings using a standard template and reusing old photos. Circulating this is trivial, especially in a hot housing market. A few of the landlords I know are older and will pass the info to an agent to paste into popular sites. But I'd hardly call that "connecting" and certainly not worth thousands of dollars. Additionally, the landlords will often give first dibs to internal housing sites for local universities or to other current tenants to spread to their network. So it frequently doesn't even require posting on a public site, and in these cases the agent only becomes involved in the situation when it is time to fill out the rental app. This is especially common when people move for grad school or choose to stay after undergrad and want to live near their peers/friends. So you can imagine the sheer amount of money that gets collected for 0 return in Boston. I'm not against real estate agent commissions in general obviously, but the way rental brokerage fees work is an absolute scam in parts of the US.
    - tdeck 5y ago
      This whole discussion is so bizarre to me, since I've only been a tenant in the SF Bay Area. We don't seem to have brokers here, or at least I've never heard of them. If the landlord pays a property manager or realtor to show the place, that's, on their end and not an additional fee (in fact, non-refundable deposits are illegal in SF). Some people who are used to this broker system seem to assume it *must" be adding some value but I can attest that it doesn't.
      - listenallyall 5y ago
        > it *must" be adding some value but I can attest that it doesn't And yet, landlords keep using it. A $2500/month apt in NYC will cost $34,500 the first year -- but only $30,000 goes to the landlord. Can you help explain why a landlord would freely give up $4500 (standard 15% fee) in potential revenue?