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I need to find an apartment

mattrighetti.com

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Re: I need to find an apartment

#241

Post by Root_Denied »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #144
timr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is hunting for an apartment doomed to be this messy forever? It seems like an area that is ripe for disruption or a better option, but what would it take to actually solve this? I hesitate to say it, but there is already a solution to this, and it has been the one that New York has had for years: you hire an agent. A good agent will sort through all of that for you, and streamline the process to the point where you…

This doesn't work in all US markets unfortunately, as I discovered recently when considering that very option you suggest. In some slower towns a few agents are willing to do this on the side as a source of income, but then in places like SF the home buying market is so hot, that it's comparatively bad ROI for agents to spend any time on most rentals. I'm curious how NYC manages to pull that off.

This was my experience as well in Seattle. I did a corporate relocation and they also provided a paid-for agent to find rentals.

She was pretty much useless. Most of the places she sent us didn't match our criteria very well, and quite a few were above where we wanted to spend. As each day went by and we nixxed place after place she clearly de-prioritized us in her work (I'm assuming she was working with multiple other people who were looking for places) and became less responsive.

At the end of the day I had to do my own hunt and fly up a second time to look at places over a weekend to find something.

And that's a paid agent from a large moving corp. I do wonder if a (more expensive) boutique agent would have been more effective but honestly having worked in real estate I consider them all at the same level as used car salesmen anyway.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#242

Post by pbasista »

Tangential. Information on the internet is often intentionally incomplete or difficult to filter. For instance, it is impossible to filter apps in the Google Play store by the presence of ads or in-app purchases within them. Why? Because Google wants it that way. In order to perform such a filtered search, one needs to create a custom crawler, then parse the data and then filter them.

If anything, with all the ads and SEO games taking place, searching for the relevant information has become _more_ difficult than in the early days of Google.

It is 2022 and we still do not have a universal search system which would allow everyone to quickly and efficiently perform more sophisticated searches. The most skilled and determined people are capable of doing so by creating various single-purpose data collection and data mining tools themselves. But even for them it takes a non-trivial time and effort to produce something usable. There is nothing out there (that I know of) which would be easily applicable to everyday needs.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#243

Post by joshspankit »

pbasista wrote: post #242

Tangential. Information on the internet is often intentionally incomplete or difficult to filter. For instance, it is impossible to filter apps in the Google Play store by the presence of ads or in-app purchases within them. Why? Because Google wants it that way. In order to perform such a filtered search, one needs to create a custom crawler, then parse the data and then filter them. If anything, with all the ads an…

Further tangent:

Many of the public search boxes are backed by elasticsearch or other similar “recommendation” tools which are optimized for speed and point-someone-in-the-right-direction accuracy.

Since we no longer have exact text matching or many of the advanced operators (such as `not`), I’d argue that for sophisticated searches search boxes have actually gotten significantly worse.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#244

Post by javajosh »

pbasista wrote: post #242

Tangential. Information on the internet is often intentionally incomplete or difficult to filter. For instance, it is impossible to filter apps in the Google Play store by the presence of ads or in-app purchases within them. Why? Because Google wants it that way. In order to perform such a filtered search, one needs to create a custom crawler, then parse the data and then filter them. If anything, with all the ads an…

The OP points the way, I think, to what will happen in practice. Three trends will meet: 1, more apps live in the browser, 2, search programs that combine data in the browser get formalized/paramterized, 3, user friendly methods arise to make writing ad hoc search programs very easy (e.g. voice driven, context aware AI).

Re: I need to find an apartment

#246

Post by Root_Denied »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #238
noahtallen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Portland, OR solved that problem by making landlords accept the first offer which matches the stated requirements. Which leads to some… interesting incentives :p

Seattle has this also. It leads to very stringent requirements, with little room for flexibility, you also have to the first qualified person to respond to an ad. It has also led to a lot of rental supply not being advertised, relying on personal connections to find tenants instead.

It's also difficult to nail landlords on, so it goes largely unenforced (at least in Seattle). Most renters aren't going to be able to afford to take a landlord to court over an apartment they didn't get, they're just going to keep hunting because they're usually on a strict timeframe to move.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#247

Post by mdavis6890 »

jthrowsitaway wrote: post #46
novocantico wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You gotta get creative. Walking down the street I met this one guy who's like 70, eccentric, military vet, owns the house, and rents it out individual rooms for $550/month. He's paid off the mortgage, just needs to pay taxes, and he's clearly making a profit since he's retired and constantly has new projects working on the house. For context that's 1/3 asking price out here.

It's great that worked out for you. It'd be great if people didn't have to get creative to find basic housing.

It would also be nice if we would stop voting for politicians that promise policies that limit supply - either directly and explicitly such as zoning laws, or as a consequence like rent control.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#248

Post by timr »

throwawayboise wrote: post #224
timr wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially. In NYC, many real estate agents will represent the renter for a service fee, just like they represent the buyer in a purchase transaction. It supplements the income that comes from the higher-value (but much less regular) money that they get from sales. There are agencies that make most of their business in this area, and generally have better rate structures (typically a month or two of rent, flat rate)…

If the agent is in any way getting compensated when you sign a lease, or as a percentage of the rent, or anything like that, they are not working for you. The only way they might be working for you is if you are paying them an hourly rate or per showing or something like that.

If you're saying that the historical "broker's fee" when renting in a place like NYC doesn't benefit you, then I agree. That broker represents the landlord, not you, and you're just being charged to make up the cost.

If you're saying that someone doesn't "work for you" unless you pay them a flat or hourly rate, then I disagree completely. All incentive structures have problems. Someone who works on contingency is incentivized to get you to sign. If they take a percentage cut, of course, they want you to sign the most expensive thing they can. Someone who works on a flat-rate basis is incentivized to do as little custom work as possible. Someone who works on an hourly basis is incentivized to drag out the proceedings. There is no perfect system.

Most of these agreements are structured where the fee is paid by you, after signing a lease, as a function of the monthly/annual rental price. The agent works for you, you just don't pay up front or a fixed cost or on an hourly basis. Does this change the incentive structure? Yes. Does it mean that they don't provide you a benefit? No. You just have to be aware of the incentives.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#249

Post by sswezey »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #2

At least OP had the full address of those apartment on that website, so he could plot them on the map. Here in Austria, most leeches, sorry, realtors, avoid putting the street in the ad to prevent you from trying to contact the property directly and bypassing their fees, so apartment hunting is even more of a headache. Still, amazing work from OP.

Most of the apartments on that site don't have the actual addresses, instead just have the city/town. It's the same issue you've experienced.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#250

Post by bmelton »

haswell wrote: post #4

I'm in the middle of an apartment search. I was reflecting the other day on how much searching for an apartment has changed over the last 10 years. Conclusion: it hasn't changed much at all. It's still necessary to search on a myriad of sites. Most of the time, by the time you inquire, a place is gone. Or the ad was misleading and that "$2000 2BR" is actually "$2000 for the cheapest Studio we have, but we also have 2…

Plugging my site, but only because it addresses some of your core complaints, and may be helpful.

Dwellsy.com has the largest inventory of any rental property site out there, is aiming for zero fraud (and has quite a few features implemented to prevent against it,) parses descriptions to more accurately represent the actual amenities (it's decent, but not perfect) and doesn't clump units in apartment buildings into one ranged price listing, as we prefer to have the units represented as individual listings.

Hopefully it'll help, but feel free to reach out directly if you run into issues.

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