28 ms·
Rate The Landlord: Anonymously share information with tenants like you
- AYoung010 3y agoHah! I had this idea in the car the other day ("like ratemyprofessor, but for landlords") -- the big issue I got hung up on is authenticity. How does this tool ensure that reviewers are actually tenants, and not landlords trying to boost their rating?
- missedthecue 3y agoupload proof of address with your name on it when creating the account, like a bank statement or electricity bill. The only way for the landlord to cheat it is to set up fake accounts with companies and get statements sent to them. Probably possible but a lot of work for 1 review
- the_pwner224 3y agoThese days those are mostly electronic, it's not hard to edit the text in a PDF to make it show a different address. Not something an average person can easily do, but trivial for a motivated attacker to pull off with a bit of money or the right friends. Also, if it has your name on it then it's no longer anonymous.
- neurobama 3y agoPhotoshop seems like a straightforward way around this method of verification. It works for the DMV here in the States, but perhaps only because lying in that context carries legal penalties.
- s1mon 3y agoAnd how would the service verify the statements? Why would it take a fake account? It's not that hard to get a sample statement and modify it to seem real. If you could get confirmation from a bank or utility that might be enough to prevent forgeries, but what incentive would there be for them and why would they want to share private information?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bombcar 3y agoAny landlord will have utilities in his name at some point or another.
- wlesieutre 3y agoNextDoor mails a card with a confirmation code to your address
- moneywoes 3y agoWeird they didn’t do it for me
- wlesieutre 3y agoThey have other options too https://help.nextdoor.com/s/article/How-to-verify-your-address?language=en_US https://help.nextdoor.com/s/article/How-to-verify-your-addre...
- lolinder 3y agoI worked for a while at a company that everyone hated, and there was an ongoing war on Glassdoor between the narcissistic CEO and the employees. Every new employee (and there were a lot of those because turnover was high) left negative reviews, and periodically the CEO would get on with a bunch of sockpuppet accounts and leave positive reviews. It was a small enough company that we knew they couldn't be real (they claimed roles that were all accounted for, and they'd all show up over a day or two with the same writing style), but Glassdoor has basically no verification and never responded to our reports. The only action their moderators ever took was to remove our reviews if we tried to call out the inauthentic ones.
- Vervious 3y agoThis could be a cool domain for LinkedIn to move into —— allow reviews only from people who publicly list the company in their profile
- aww_dang 3y agoShould be possible for 3rd parties if LinkedIn is still offering OAuth.
- DANmode 3y agoI think someone tried that; the issue lies with reviewers that really "spill the tea" (fellow kids, am I using that right?); specifically that Glassdoor can be legally compelled to unmask the reviewer.
- cogitoergofutuo 3y ago> How does this tool ensure that reviewers are actually tenants, and not landlords trying to boost their rating? I have only ever felt the need to tell other people about my landlord when they were really terrible. I had a landlord that I liked once, but “getting to hang out with a cool dog sometimes” wouldn’t have compelled me to seek out and contribute to a review website. I would simply treat anything on the site that’s even slightly more effusive than “I have had little to no reason to interact with my landlord” as patent garbage.
- lolinder 3y agoThis is how I pretty much treat all reviews these days. There is relatively little incentive to lie in a negative review (a competitor could try to trash on you, but I've yet to see that become a big problem and it would be potentially actionable), but there are lots of reasons why someone would want to manufacture positive reviews. So I typically just read through the negatives these days and see if there's a common theme.
- UberFly 3y agoGood points. These platforms, if they gain traction, get sullied quick and are anything but objective.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoHow about this scheme: a service that provides a hash of your {SSN, DOB, domain of a web site}, which allows anyone to cryptographically check that the domain is part of the hash, but not SSN or DOB, and which is required to create an account. This guarantees that any physical person can create one and only one account on that web site and also preserves anonymity.
- askvictor 3y agoNeeds a critical mass of tenants. Any landlord with a significant portion of low ratings would be assumed that the positive ratings are fake.
- kazinator 3y agoRequire the reviews to be videos of someone speaking, and require that they turn their head sideways several times during the video.
- gigatexal 3y agoThe search is broken on mobile for me. Using the drop downs to filter I can’t hit the x to close on mobile safari. It’s as if the page dies.
- arcanemachiner 3y agoI made a site like this, but for tenants to rate the places they lived in: https://ratethispad.com/ https://ratethispad.com/ I've pretty much never promoted it so it's quite empty, but feel free to pop over.
- 0716895006 3y ago[flagged]
- ikiris 3y agoYou might consider a better way than dropdown selection for zipcodes. heh
- tjpnz 3y agoI would have loved to have had something like this when I was living in New Zealand, which is notorious for slumlords and rentals which are literal health hazards. Every time someone has proposed something like this for New Zealand on the NZ subreddit there are questions around legality (although some of it might just be fear mongering). How does it work out in the US? Are you planning to take info for properties worldwide?
- sour-taste 3y agoTwo decades ago we moved to new Zealand and the apartment my mom had rented (sight unseen since we were moving from the us) was unlivable with bugs and garbage literring the house. Can confirm that new Zealand has this problem
- henearkr 3y agoAlways visit before renting, to see it but also to hear it (in particular traffic noise level). (Book a cheap hotel if you need for the first weeks. Make sure your belongings arrive by the slow route (e.g. by sea) and are re-routable when you know your definitive address.)
- photonbeam 3y agoHow are the NZ defamation laws? I hear nearby Australia is pretty intense about it
- KerryJones 3y agoI've nearly built this site for years -- it's actually partially created in one of my project folders. Thanks for doing this!
- lxe 3y agoSites like these have been popping up everywhere through the years. Why not simply use Yelp or Google? What are the moderation and verification challenges? What about legal/defamation issues? How would one trust each review?
- diogenescynic 3y agoYelp and Google are not reliable--no review website I've seen really is. For instance, Makras Real Estate in San Francisco is a horrible property management company (i.e. slumlord) where the owner was even concvicted of crimes: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/jury-convicts-san-francisco-broker-and-investor-victor-makras-fraud-real-estate-loan https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/jury-convicts-san-franc... but only after the news of this became public did the ratings on those site show Makras Real Estate as anything less than a 4/5 star company and most of the one sentence reviews were from accounts with generic profile pictures and only a handful of other reviews--they were clearly faked. I reported it multiple times and nothing ever happened. Facebook even responded saying the accounts looked legit and still shows Makras as having 4.9/5.0--what a joke!
- notfed 3y agoWhy would an alternative rating site be more trustworthy?
- diogenescynic 3y agoI don't think any of them would be unless they verified an ID to make sure each account was actually unique--but currently none of them have any incentives to limit their user count. Users = growth! So they just turn a blind eye to it.
- awesome_dude 3y agoFor me, I don't think any review/reference site is really much use. The problems are: * Is the review accurate * Is the reviewer someone who has similar standards as I * Is the review looking at aspects I rate * Does the reviewer have a bias (good/bad) * Was the review based on a representative sample It's the same for job references, service reviews, product reviews. It's almost random.
- diebeforei485 3y agoSend people a postcard to verify their address. If they lived there recently, they probably set up forwarding - so USPS would forward the postcard to their new address, and they could still verify themselves as being a tenant during the past 12 months. I agree with the concept and we definitely need this. The issue, generally speaking, is that there isn't much of a business model.
- ydlr 3y ago> I agree with the concept and we definitely need this. The issue, generally speaking, is that there isn't much of a business model. This is similar to one of the anti-businesses I have long considered, except I would like to perform actual, invasive background checks on landlords. A couple others: - A service for employees to drug-test their employers. - A neighborhood watch app to report suspected police activity in your community.
- david_shi 3y agoI think a business model that mirrors a brokerage could work. Brokers are essentially a pure middleman with very little added value outside of connecting the owner with the tenant, so the audience here is definitely worth something.
- throwawaylinux 3y ago> I would like to perform actual, invasive background checks on landlords. Why would a landlord sign up for that though? A rating system or history is one thing, but what additional value would a tenant have in a landlord who passes these "invasive background checks"? > - A service for employees to drug-test their employers. What's the goal there? What are the incentives? Why would employers sign up to it and why would employees especially care? The system doesn't have your real or perceived injustices because there are a few evil fat-cat employers and landlords who just need to be shown the error of their ways and/or publicly shamed about their hypocrisy and driven off. It just happens as a consequence of the incentives involved. > - A neighborhood watch app to report suspected police activity in your community. What would be the goal? Every neighborhood group I've seen significantly features discussions about crimes and police activity. As far as I can see the most use people get out of them is being alerted to speed traps.
- crossroadsguy 3y agoThese folks must definitely launch this in Bangalore, India. They must :)
- smith-kyle 3y agoI would love if this became popular! Just submitted a review for a solid landlord I had a couple years ago. The zip code dropdown is broken, at least on mobile safari. Would like an input with type="number" rather than a drop down.
- ilikehurdles 3y agoIf glassdoor can’t protect the anonymity of its reviewers, this can’t either. There will be legal allegations of libel that will lead to one’s identity being revealed by court order or otherwise. I also find these sites largely useless for research as only the people with extremely strong sentiment would go out of their way to add a review, meaning almost any management company with a large number of tenants will end up with bad ratings, as some portion of those tenants almost definitely will have a negative perception of the management and that portion will be overrepresented in the tally.
- srcreigh 3y agoIt’s their own fault if they say something in a review that they can’t prove.
- MollyRealized 3y agoPeople maintain this sort of blind faith only until they are bitten themselves.
- _cenw 3y agoTruth doesn't matter in the US court system, unless both sides are equally well funded. Given that one party owns capital and the other rents, I'd say that seems not too likely.
- quonn 3y agoSo you think the landlord can just liquidate what you call the capital? Sell the house? Unless it‘s a large landlord, chances are that the renter is more liquid.
- infinitezest 3y agoIn my experience, the more difficult a landlord is, the more tenants they have.
- _cenw 3y ago
- oefrha 3y agoThe only barrier to defamation is an hCaptcha. Not a good idea. > What do I do if I receive a dishonest review? > Landlords who believe they have received a dishonest review can report the review and include their email in the report form. We will contact you directly to address the issue. Good luck addressing issues you can’t verify.
- givemeethekeys 3y agoIt's the Yelp model. Landlords will pay to get negative reviews taken off if they think it's affecting their business... you know, when a time comes where there'll be plentiful rental property to choose from /s
- kennyloginz 3y agoAfter looking at this site for a bit, I have a hunch that it was created by landlords. The quotes were designed to push a false narrative. Humans don’t talk like that.
- blendergeek 3y agoWould you explain what you mean by "a false narrative"?
- switch007 3y agoExactly the kind of site a landlord would make
- xpe 3y agoI read https://ratethelandlord.org/about https://ratethelandlord.org/about. It is vague. What are their policies? Who controls moderation? Why should we trust them to carry out their claimed mission?
- xpe 3y agoI don’t expect to agree on one notion of fairness, but I want to know how the service will behave. There are a range of good and bad actions on both sides. Services all have some implied/stated/actual policies and ethics (or lack thereof). How exactly are tenants treated fairly? Landlords? So far what I see are unstated policies, opaqueness around moderation and curation, and a lack of organizational and structural reputation and accountability. We need to pay more attention to human nature and models of trust before launching and using a product. You don’t pivot to find a model of ethics and trust; is should be the foundation.
- weatherlight 3y agoAh, yes, the classic 'human nature' argument, as if our current system of landlord-tenant relationships is the epitome of ethical behavior. At least this platform attempts to level the playing field by giving tenants a voice. Sure, it may not be perfect, but let's not pretend that the status quo is a shining example of trust and ethics. Instead of criticizing the very idea, maybe we could focus on improving the platform and establishing those foundational values you speak of. Or, you know, we could just continue to trust our benevolent landlord overlords without question.
- xpe 3y ago> Instead of criticizing the very idea, maybe we could focus on improving the platform and establishing those foundational values you speak of. Or, you know, we could just continue to trust our benevolent landlord overlords without question. A false dichotomy. You don’t know me. I’ve rented in many jurisdictions. I likely share many of your values. This is not primarily a technological problem. One key to solving this problem well is setting up the organizational structure reasonably. What legal structures are in place? Whose personal reputations are on the line? What track record do we have to go on? Some may think these organizational things can be done later. I disagree. They should be designed before any product is launched. They are foundational.
- xpe 3y ago> Ah, yes, the classic 'human nature' argument, as if our current system of landlord-tenant relationships is the epitome of ethical behavior. Hold on; I didn’t say that. I don’t think that landlord tenant relationships are fairly balanced in most jurisdictions. It seems you assumed incorrectly about me. If you got my intentions wrong, how do you know you got the intentions of the website correct? Why do you assume that the website is trustworthy? (Do you?) What gives you confidence that it will put in place reasonable moderation standards? Please, let’s try to remain calm and use logic here.
- jl6 3y agoFeels destined to be like the rate my teacher sites which host copious defamatory reviews, pranks, and trolls.
- pteraspidomorph 3y agoThere's one review for "the mods of r/australia". I somehow suspect that's not a real rental property. I'm also seeing: Review contents not matching star ratings, in both directions (landlord is a compulsive liar, respect: 5 stars!) Repeats that appear to be the same disgruntled tenant posting multiple times Landlords could also be behind some of the positive reviews. It's hard to tell.
- henearkr 3y agoPlease open it to other countries as well, maybe all of them, it doesn't matter if it is English only for now.
- tiku 3y agoI had a similar idea but abandoned it for multiple reasons. 1) gdpr/avg. You can't record data in Europe about a landlord or an address without permission. 2) landlords are not people that you want to annoy. Especially the bad ones.
- refurb 3y agoIt's not going to be useful. The only people who provide reviews will be people who are unhappy. And you'll only get their side.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoThere are two sides to every story. And a disgruntled tenant is, not infrequently, a really awful neighbor. Landlords often can't proceed to eviction until a tenant has been really recalcitrant, a huge pain, or doing patently illegal stuff and bringing the wrath of the State down on the property. Tenants often have nothing better to do than snipe and feud at either their neighbors or the landlord, and the worst disputes are the one that take place close to home. I'm really blessed that I have a good, ethical landlord now, and even my neighbors give so little to complain about, so I just get by, and it's always smart not to stick your neck out, lest it get chopped.
- refurb 3y agoThey'll be like hotel ratings. A bunch of 1 star reviews complaining the breakfast buffet closed at 10am and they wouldn't extend the hours for them personally.
- dazc 3y agoThis could be the next Trustpilot, subscribe today to remove your bad reviews.
- firefoxd 3y agoMaybe the verification process is not perfect, but there is very little you can do if you have a bad landlord. In fact, you are at their complete mercy because you need them to give a good reference to your next landlord. Great job to whoever made this. I encourage you to keep going at it and improving it until it becomes an indispensable consumer tool. Can't wait for the time where landlords have to explain themselves.
- quickthrower2 3y agoProbably useless because until say 50%+ of all the landlords in your area are rated, the chances are the place you want doesn't have a rating. Requiring a rating would hamper your research. What we need of course is better protection for tenants in general.
- 8bitsrule 3y agoI take it that the data currently in there for my city is 'demonstration' data. There is very low correspondence between the 'star rating' system (all 5s in every category for all landlords) and what the 'written review' is saying. I've rented in many locales over a long time. How much power the landlords have is pretty much up to local statutes. Some cities make them give you a copy of the landlord-tenant laws. In some cities, for example, if they don't make timely repairs, they may be forced to pay for your move. If they 'visit' your place without 48 hours notice (except in emergency) they've broken the law. Adding this tenant-impowering information to a site like this would make it much more valuable.
- pharmakom 3y agoI don’t think this will work, for the many reasons other comments have laid out, but I hope something can be done. The power imbalance between landlords and tenants is outrageous. Tenant legal rights are rarely respected. Agencies basically ignore the needs of tenants. I cannot think of another product category where the buyer is treated so poorly - and for a service costing 1000s of dollars! Clearly the current incentive structures are not working.
- klabb3 3y ago> I cannot think of another product category where the buyer is treated so poorly - and for a service costing 1000s of dollars! If we’re talking about the US, health insurance and time shares must be worse, no?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- balderdash 3y agoI think this varies dramatically state to state. Perversely my experience has been that strong tenants’ rights are highly correlated with high hurdles to renting
- beepbooptheory 3y agoHow so? Also, which states have strong tenant's rights?
- balderdash 3y agoFor example it can be a long drawn out process to evict someone in NYC for non payment of rent, and super easy in TX. Which means landlords in Texas run a credit check and take first and last months deposit and you’re in business because if you don’t pay, you’re gone shortly thereafter. In NYC you need to provide bank accounts, tax returns, have co-signers etc. because if you end up not paying it could be a long drawn out struggle to get you out and they don’t want to take that risk. Which leads to my comment that perversely the bar to renting becomes higher where there are more tenants rights
- windex 3y agoI've heard that landlords in Bangalore, India demand the equivalent of 1 year's rent as deposit, your grad school scores, a write up about yourself, linkedin profile, caste, marriage status, scores of hidden charges, living rules that dictate food and dress rules and even specify curfew timings. There are also instances where some landlords have even demanded to see the mobile history of renters.
- keiferski 3y agoI've had to deal with difficult landlords a handful of times and I'd say the common thread is that they expect you, the tenant, to not understand your rights and the laws that enforce those rights. This is especially the case in low-quality housing units near universities, where students generally don't live in a single place for more than a year or two. For example, one time a landlord didn't return the security deposit. I called him, messaged him, left notes in his mailbox. No reply. One month, two months went by. So, I looked up the relevant legal code, found the part that said "landlords have 30 days to return the security deposit with any deductions listed. Failure to do so results in the landlord owing the tenant double the original amount with no deductions." I printed that out, highlighted the relevant section, and mailed him a letter saying that he can return the original deposit amount to me immediately, or I will file at the local court and he'll owe me double. I got a check in the mail two days later.
- qwertox 3y ago> that they expect you, the tenant, to not understand your rights and the laws that enforce those rights It could well be that they themselves don't understand your rights. Sure, in the case of the security deposit, they should be smart enough to know what this is. But many landlords are just normal people with other jobs, where being a landlord is not a job to them, but an opportunity to earn money by renting. While one should be able to expect them to know the relevant laws, I bet that most of them don't care to bother because of the time and effort it takes.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI've written a few landlord reviews, and none were even pseudonymous; my identity was exposed in each case. Of course downthread they are totally correct; if you give enough information about particular disputes you had, you automatically reveal your identity anyway. The sites where I left reviews were carefully patrolled by the business itself, so I often receoved responses or feedback on what I'd said. At some point I defended their practices around maintenance, and they thanked me. At another point, I was disgruntled, and they made a public reply offering to meet with me, which was disingenuous since they had no such intent. The reality of the landlord-tenant relationship in these United States, especially at a low income level and a frighteningly low vacancy rate, is that the tenant is absolutely powerless and defenseless in any dispute. Evictions are quick, easy, and decisive. There is no lawyer who will defend tenants against landlords because there's no money in that. You can try to play the landlord-tenants rights game, but once you stick your neck out as a nuisance, all they have to do is decide not to renew your lease, and you're out in the cold. There's no recourse for that.
- metters 3y agoIt is frightening, how little tenants are protected from being kicked out by the landlord in the US. Are there major differences between the states? In contrast to that, I believe tenants are too well protected in Europe, or at least Germany, from sitting out in the cold. For example, if a tenant has not paid rent in months (and is not planning on doing so) it still is legally difficult to put them on the street. I think the term for that is squatter?! Friend of mine had damage on his property exceeding €10k until he could regain control over his apartment/flat.
- quags 3y agoI can’t speak for other states but there are a number of protections in New Jersey where you cannot easily be kicked out as a tenant with out going to court including things like non payment. This was before Covid added further protections which some have been rolled back.
- Fnoord 3y ago> I think the term for that is squatter?! Squatting falls under the principle that when a building is unused (a broad term) for a long period of time (e.g. a year), it may be squatted because there is a housing shortage and the country is owned by the civilians. And eviction is generally not straightforward because having a roof above your head is a basic right. I would say its the USA which is backwards here. I mean, WTF. If you decide your tennant has to go, they just have to deal with your decision, make their next weeks of their life revolve around your decision, no matter what? What if they are ill? Need help from others? Cannot relocate easily? Need to find a different job as a result? A one month notice is very, very short. Btw, squatting isn't even legal anymore in The Netherlands.
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y agoif it can bring some small amount of accountability and awareness, that's a step in the right direction. but the nature of capital is such that if these websites succeed then their incentives will start to more closely align with those of the landlords. not every problem can be solved with software.
- edpichler 3y agoIs this legal? What if the opposite, a community of landlords rating tenants? I think it's very useful but I wonder if it is legal.
- bombcar 3y agoIt will be almost entirely protected by section 230. And the opposite exists and is MORE regulated in the credit bureaus and similar. If the town is small enough there are informal whisper-networks. And of course you can google the name of the landlord or the tenant if you want. Many bad ones of either leak tons of information on social media.
- hkt 3y agoZero stars: landlord expected me to pay to live somewhere they did nothing to maintain or add any value to, but at the end I discovered I had not accrued a capital share in the property. Complete scam, avoid.
- monstertank 3y agoUse a real estate agent, solves most problems like this
- vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago[dead]
- wrren 3y agoIt's depressing how poor most of the ratings are. Landlords really don't have to put any effort in at all.
- bombcar 3y agoTenants satisfied with their landlords are 1. unlikely to move and 2. unlikely to search out some rating place.
- richardw 3y agoAustralia needs this. Not that it’ll help because all power rests with property owners, but at the very least some owner reviews could help change the conversation.
- askvictor 3y agoThis site has Australian ratings in it. Only problem is at the moment, the rental market is so tight, you really have no choice about your agent.
- richardw 3y agoI think the extra heat might help over time. A possible path could be ratings -> media -> pressure. On the margin if people avoid your properties it’ll impact you first when there is a downturn. Agree nothing will come of it in the current state, but a lack of reviews definitely won’t help.
- vinnic 3y agoThis is no substitute for laws that protect tenants, and an authority that actually enforces these laws. Indeed the very existence of such a site indicates how badly the system is failing tenants. If landlords were held to account via conventional means, there would be no need for third-party rating websites at all.
- frickinadorable 3y agoCertainly not a substitute, but come on, no need at all? We have food handling safety laws and restaurant inspectors, so there’s no need to review restaurants?
- seydor 3y agoMaybe this could work with the airbnb model: Let landlords make a home profile and verify renters. But unlike airbnb the system is heavily rigged
- ak_111 3y agoI think something like that could and should only work at the government/public/macro level. One approach: when a tenant gets back their deposit via the deposit protection scheme they get asked to rate their landlord and provide further feedback (data provided is private to landlord and tenant). This is then used to score landlords (similar to credit scores) - for example if they consistently get bad reviews from tenants who got back their full deposit (so "good" tenants) their reviews get reviewed by a person and they get barred from landlording or have to pay a penalty. It is admittedly a very elaborate process that will induce a lot of overhead, but housing market is so broken in most of the world and will probably require radical intrusive policies to fix. Making landlording less appealing/ more work by punishing bad landlording is not a bad start.
- Varqu 3y agoHow about ratethetenant.com - I can imagine many property owners paying heavy $$$ for such rating.
- why5s 3y agoDon't landlords more or less already have access to this via credit scores, background checks etc? I don't think there's a reasonable equivalent to this for tenants.
- bombcar 3y agoIt's exactly what they have access to, though the landlord will usually be looking at credit to determine the tenant has a job and can pay, the background check is more useful to see if they have any tenant/landlord civil suits in their history.
- Varqu 3y agoGenerally the more transparency there is on both sides, the better: This way, the market can punish bad behaviors (abusive landlords / problematic tenants) and reward those who act properly.
- kevviiinn 3y agoYea, give more power to landlords. Brilliant If you to this you're a horrible person, just like the people who made the app for landlords to collude on price hikes https://www.npr.org/2022/10/17/1129489582/this-computer-software-might-have-told-your-landlord-they-could-raise-your-rent https://www.npr.org/2022/10/17/1129489582/this-computer-soft... https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-evictions-monarch-investment-rental-properties/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-evictions-monarch-in...
- DANmode 3y agoSolid NPR rundown. Thanks.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoLike a lot of these efforts, I suspect it will start off OK, but rapidly dissolve into either a protection racket, or a gossipy, unreliable, junk drawer of hate. The Internet shows what happens, when we don't have to be accountable for our words. Inside of almost every one of us, is a monster, waiting to burst forth, once we know the guardrails have been removed. But the other side of the coin, is that people can be punished and silenced for legitimate concerns. "Landlords" are, increasingly, changing from the little old lady, renting out her cottage, to huge conglomerate corporations, with the means and the desire to silence critics. In the aggregate, we're probably better off without these types of sites, and encouraging remedy through "proper channels," which is a hard sell, as these large corporations are pretty good at owning the channels.
- bombcar 3y agoyou also have the problem where ChrisMarshallNY may rent from bombcar for decades, and since nothing ever went wrong, there were no complaints at all on either side. But some other person rented for a year and there was a complication - and how THAT was handled matters more than anything when comparing. https://xkcd.com/325/ https://xkcd.com/325/ comes to mind. I think a "Zillow-like" database of properties that talked about the rental and only indirectly about the landlord could be more useful.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoLove that XKCD!
- jwie 3y agoLandlords should be required to publish what capital they’re putting into a property, including interest. This data point alone would make it clear how good of a landlord you have. There are two tough spots for landlords. There are some truly awful tenants out there. You can’t effectively screen them out. The other hard place is lenders. Lenders soak up the margin. Unless the landlord rents out free and clear property he’s always behind, and it’s hard to maintain “his” property to provide a real service to tenants when he's collecting for the bank.
- benjaminwootton 3y agoOn the contrary, lenders have been the landlords best friend. Until recently, you could borrow money at 1-1.5%, buy a property and rent it for 5%+ return, banking the difference. This was basically free money and the optimal thing to do was to borrow as much as you can for as long as you can. You could put a small deposit down, and by the time you add the margin on the borrowed piece then you were yielding 10-20% on your cash in. Much better than just the 5% on unemcumbered property. This model has completely collapsed as interest rates of normalised.
- tetromino_ 3y ago> Until recently, you could borrow money at 1-1.5% Please share more details. Because even during the pandemic, when rates were at their minimum, the lowest conventional 30 year mortgage rate that I saw was over 2.7%.
- benjaminwootton 3y agoI was referring to the UK, where we tend to have 2-5 year fixes. Rates were less than 2% for a long time.
- balderdash 3y agoI can’t see how that statistic is remotely useful given the varying condition, age, type, etc of the housing stock
- syndacks 3y agoCan anyone recommend a, “as a tenant, these are your rights in jurisdiction X”?
- bombcar 3y agohttps://www.avail.co/education/laws https://www.avail.co/education/laws might be a good starting point, but there may be local laws, too. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/state-landlord-tenant-laws https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/state-landlord-tenan... https://ipropertymanagement.com/laws/landlord-tenant-rights https://ipropertymanagement.com/laws/landlord-tenant-rights
- _jplc 3y agoThis would be great in a market in which people looking for housing have power of choice. Too many times you're renting whatever is available in the area you need to live in at the price you can afford, and the landlord's ratings will have little to no weight on the final decision.
- user3939382 3y agoAfter hearing decades of rent vs buy financial debates and arguments about equity, interest, etc, the strongest factor in my decision to buy has surprisingly turned out to be “90% of the landlord’s I’ve had have been either bad or terrible and I can’t deal with it anymore”.
- bombcar 3y agoIt's amazing, every other professional we hire we'd be absolutely flabbergasted if someone suggested we use someone who did it once a month, on the side, and wasn't trained or certified or anything. But that's exactly what most landlords are, unless you're renting an apartment from a massive company.
- xur17 3y agoI don't know if I've just been lucky, but to add anec-data, I've rented from 5 different landlords in 2 different states, and I've never had a real negative experience. When I have an issue, it's resolved relatively quickly, noise mostly isn't a problem, and I can easily move to a new location with fairly limited hassle. Rent has perhaps increased more than I'd like at times, but no more than the market price would indicate it should.
- louison11 3y agoThis is great. I've had unfortunate issues with landlords before and wished this existed. When your landlord is a real estate company (say, in a building complex), it's usually smoother because they have a reputation to manage (and Google reviews!). But when you're dealing with sole proprietors, you're dealing with that person as a human and all of their potential character traits. Good or bad. Some landlords do not understand that they are providing a professional service to a customer (the tenant). They can sometimes be super approachable, but lack proper boundaries, not give enough space or completely fail to deliver. In a previous house, some things needed attention and it took the landlords forever to fix it. Same thing to give the deposit back. And they kept giving us excuses like "We're new parents. We have a baby." And even got mad at me when I requested the deposit after 3 weeks. I had plenty of compassion for them being new parents, (since we also have a young baby), but if I pay you for something, you need to treat it as a business and act professionally. Your personal problems have no place in the business...
- bombcar 3y agoThe vast, vast majority of single family landlords do NOT treat it as a business and don't even properly account for everything; they're being held up by appreciation and if that stops the whole market around that will collapse. Once you actually treat it like a business, you realize "wow this is why real estate companies don't manage single family homes as rentals" - and if you hire one to manage your property and do the math you're realize you're losing money before appreciation unless you have a small or no loan; and if that's the case you should just sell and buy into an REIT anyway.
- DANmode 3y ago> if that stops the whole market around that will collapse. What does that look like, and for how long?
- louison11 3y agoI'm not sure I follow you. Most of the houses I've rented were fully paid off so my rent (- minor expenses) was net profit for the landlord. Sometimes it was their sole income stream + retirement. But even if the house is still on a mortgage, and my rent is less than their monthly payment (say 80%), it still means they're buying their house at only 20% of its cost. 40 years later, they can resell and get all of that money back too, even if the house did not appreciate.
- netsharc 3y agoA slick video of their version 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcspUD0kF7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcspUD0kF7g
- sadvsavesa 3y ago> Landlords who believe they have received a dishonest review can report the review and include their email in the report form. We will contact you directly to address the issue. I am sure this sounds like a great resource for people that are renting and have bad experiences but after reading this in the FAQ, I am not so sure. How do they manage fake reviews, fake reports etc. Its an open source project and by a quick look at the code on github [0], it seems like a project with a handful of commits and contributors. I cannot help but wonder how much time these folk will have for handling customer support and what process they follow to settle disputes (considering the review was posted anonymously and looks like doesn't even require an email). Generally, I would be OK if this sort of thing takes time for small projects but this project literally is about reviewing people (including names, addresses etc) from anonymous users on the internet. I'd be concerned. [0] https://github.com/RateTheLandlord https://github.com/RateTheLandlord
- that_guy_iain 3y agoAnd by the nature of what it is, it's going to lend itself more to people who are unhappy with their landlords than those who are happy. And I wouldn't be surprised if this projects ends up getting legal letters very quickly if it takes off.
- robryk 3y agoA natural way to cause positive reviews to appear is for landlords to point out the site to tenants. Sadly, this can very easily morph into basically requiring tenants to leave positive reviews (i.e. disadvantaging them until a positive review appears).
- pontifier 3y agoBack in 2012 I was on a startup weekend team that built the opposite. It was a site to help landlords vet tenants. It's remarkable the amount of damage a bad tenant can do. We never actually launched it due to the possibility of it being misused in housing discrimination and our liability for hosting information that could contribute to that. Truly there are a few bad apples in most groups that just make any progress difficult.
- carrja99 3y agoYep! Had a problem tenant that was like pulling teeth to get rent out of them, turned out the problem was the roommate. Once the roommate moved out getting full rent arrived like clockwork. On the flip side, as we were installing new laundry units in the condos, I recounted to my wife about how in college we had to pay monthly for the convenience to rent laundry machines from the 80s.
- galleywest200 3y agoI have never had problems renting from individuals. It is when _everything_ is handled by some legal entity that it all goes down hill. As long as the actual owner of the house is a human (not a company), and I can talk to them, I have no issues. Maybe I am just a disarming conversationalist, or maybe I just got lucky.
- subpixel 3y agoIn NYC landlords go to great lengths to hide their identity and real estate brokers aid and abet them. It’s not uncommon to pay rent to an LLC that has only an attorney attached to it publicly, and often these entities are property-specific. In my renting years I asked brokers who owned the building on numerous occasions and was told basically that’s private information. I knew this was bollocks but there’s not a lot most people can do.
- juujian 3y agoGlad to finally have a chance to shit on that property rental company :)
- luxuryballs 3y agoI’m so glad I got out of the slumlord game, at a certain level and below if you don’t get college students you’re gonna have a bad time no matter what. Nothing is ever the fault of the tenant and as soon as you even mention their oft neglected lease obligations you’re an unreasonable monster.
- sourcecodeplz 3y agoThis looks like the biggest honeypot for legal libel.
- tristor 3y agoI think their heart is in the right place, but this is also not the right way to handle this. Do what I do instead. When you have a dispute with your landlord and they're failing to either follow the law or the contract, sue them. This is what lawsuits are for. In most cases, you can file yourself and represent yourself in small claims court. I've won, every single time, and I've sued nearly every landlord I've had in my life, because unfortunately most landlords are scumbags that will absolutely try to illegally steal from you or otherwise cause you harm. There's no point in me "reviewing them" on some random site which someone may or may not see and which has no legal authority. Now there is a permanent court record, publicly searchable by anyone online, showing that they were sued by a tenant and lost because they had done something illegal. I highly highly recommend people to sue their landlords when they do illegal and damaging things. It's not just your right, it's the right thing to do.
- thethethethe 3y agoI sued my land lord recently and it was an absolutely awful experience that took years and cost thousands of dollars. We won but havent been able to recover the money yet because our old land lord is a slippery scumbag. Now we need to put a lien on his property, which is a huge pain in the ass. It almost wasn't worth it tbh. Posting a bad review is much easier and accessable
- enraged_camel 3y agoLawsuits cost money, and in most cases there tends to be a large wealth disparity between landlord and tenant. Landlords know this, not just in general but also in particular since they've seen your finances (proof of income etc.) before letting you move in. So when the time comes to consider whether to try to screw you over, the choice tends to be rather easy.
- tristor 3y agoIn most US jurisdictions small claims court requires self-representation, so your landlord can’t out spend you on lawyers to win. I thought what you said too before I filed the first time. It cost me $50 to file and I was able to do it by mail. It took forever to get the case heard because the landlord was a huge d-bag who intentionally dodged service for nearly two years, but I got my day in court and it took less than 20 minutes in front of a judge to be awarded my deposit back + interest + a penalty on the landlord. I showed up to court over my lunch break and was back to work before anyone knew I had left. No lawyers, just a single file folder of evidence, a $50 check, and one printed and mailed form to file. It can sometimes be challenging to get paid, but many times it’s a manager acting improperly on behalf of a national corporate landlord and they will cut you a check immediately, they get sued so often it’s an expected business expense (says something about how scummy landlords are).
- anthomtb 3y agoSo there are ways to vet tenants (credit/background checks) and ways to vet landlords (sites like TFA). They are not ideal but they exist. Now what is the best way to vet a property management firm? For background, I own a townhome that I plan to move out of soon. I would like to keep it as a rental but do not want to manage it myself. All I've got for finding a property management firm are Google reviews (worried they are gamed) and colleagues recommendations (they will ignore the request and tell me to manage it myself).
- shnock 3y agoFind other small landlords in your area and get a word of mouth rec, or ask for references from current clients of the firm you are checking out
- EGreg 3y agoHow does this verify that you actually live there? How does this prevent sybil attacks against a landlord? (Whenever I architect this stuff, I ask these standard questions)
- realjohng 3y agoYeah! A yelp for landlord- This information is currently missing from the net.
- hasbeenthere 3y agoThe ideal way a landlord review site would work is tenants like reviews of landlords. But if the system is anonymous, what's to stop any of the following bad actor situations? * Real tenants leave false negative reviews: people who really did have the landlord, but has some feud with the landlord unrelated to the rental, leave negative reviews. * Fake tenants leave false negative reviews: same as above, except the people didn't actually live there, such as the landlord's competitors. *Fake tenants leave false positive reviews: friends of the landlord, or the landlord's sockpuppet account, leave glowing reviews. How can the site be trustworthy given that you don't know if you're reading a legitimate or fake review.
- RocketOne 3y agoThis site (which currently wont connect) was created by some redditors. I understand the sentiment, and the reasoning but I predict it will fail as did previous attempts to create a very similar landlord rating site. Why? Because unless there is rigid control over who is allowed to input and some verification of that input, there will be an influx of garbage comments that will make the site completely useless. Much like YELP reviews, you can read 'em but do you actually trust what they say? Is the submitter an actual tenant, the landlord, or the landlord's family and friends? Who knows? Secondly, I think a single lawsuit may bring it down. There have been similar private sites for tenant information that landlords shared among themselves that have been shut down by the privacy commissioner. My understanding is that this site is going to try and anonymize certain data, but Im not sure how its going to hold useful data and anonymize it enough to make a landlord unidentifiable at the same time. Yes, everyone has a bad landlord story. But every landlord has quite a few bad tenant stories. If this site flies, prepare for the same to be done for tenants.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mawadev 3y agoI think the angle from rating a property you rented would be better. Just like rating a company you worked for. Going into details about noise levels, how the winter feels, what the issues with water pipes may be... so on.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zenpolish 3y agoThis is long overdue, and I can see this taking off like Yelp. Just stick with it and work on the website's branding, and you'll do well. I plan to share this with everyone I know.