501–510 of 593 posts
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Something something rose-tinted glasses. You could schedule in advance. Now having them actually show up? That was debatable. lol
Hand to heart I’ve had more Ubers not show up (more than 5) than I did car services over several decades of NYC living. Worse they claimed I didn’t show up.
Edit: Here! https://apartment.app/s
We used this pre-COVID to get out of a Brooklyn lease and had a fantastic experience (back when it was Flip Instant). Flip basically charged 1 month rent and guaranteed a fill or they'd pay the rest (6 months) of my lease. Compared to our landlord who wanted 1.75x rent, up to 2.75x rent if not filled immediately, after significant negotiation. Hiring a broker myself would have likely cost 1x rent or more anyways with…
The landlord is under no obligation to accept anyone this service finds, so this startup guarantees an outcome they cannot control. It might be a way to build awareness and goodwill, but they are burning VC capital to offer a service that is either fundamentally unsustainable or mispriced.
this is like half of all businesses in SV
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The landlord is under no obligation to accept anyone this service finds, so this startup guarantees an outcome they cannot control. It might be a way to build awareness and goodwill, but they are burning VC capital to offer a service that is either fundamentally unsustainable or mispriced.
>they are burning VC capital to offer a service that is either fundamentally unsustainable or mispriced this is like half of all businesses in SV
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"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 t…
"Especially now with the internet," can you show me a service that doesn't extract its own fee when connecting buyers and sellers?
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.
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And how realistic, exactly, do you think getting regulation pushed through in NYC is, exactly? Unless there is true citizen outrage (and there will never be, given what market we're talking about), you're going to need lobbied buy-in from currently sitting politicians and their successors . So if you're lucky, maybe you'll get something tentative in 2040. In the mean time: software can solve this problem now . Now so…
> software can solve this problem now. Software can displace a middle man, and replace it with a monopoly. Once monopoly power is in place, Software will then become more and more expensive until it is as bad or worse than what it supplanted. Investors will get rich, there will be a brief bubble where some people will get a VC-funded good deal, and then nobody else wins.
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> software can solve this problem now. Software can displace a middle man, and replace it with a monopoly. Once monopoly power is in place, Software will then become more and more expensive until it is as bad or worse than what it supplanted. Investors will get rich, there will be a brief bubble where some people will get a VC-funded good deal, and then nobody else wins.
You're going to have to work a lot harder to argue the connection between the first and second part of that first sentence, because one does not lead to the other. You might be right --I don't think you are, but you might be-- but right now that sentence means nothing, and that fully undermines whatever point you're trying to argue.
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As with most things: it’s complicated. When you sign a lease agreement, you get a guarantee that your rent will not go up during the term of that agreement. So, if you sign a lease for $1000 a month on Monday, and on Tuesday the market rent for that area spikes to $10,000 a month, you’re locked in with a lower rate. If I were a landlord in Oregon, given the above law, I would just only rent month to month. Breaking a…
That doesn't make any sense, the Oregon law works very well for the landlord in that case. Tenant is locked in at $1000/mo. 6 months in, decides they want to move. Tenant pays $1500 to break lease, and landlord can charge $10000/mo immediately to the next tenant.
We used this pre-COVID to get out of a Brooklyn lease and had a fantastic experience (back when it was Flip Instant). Flip basically charged 1 month rent and guaranteed a fill or they'd pay the rest (6 months) of my lease. Compared to our landlord who wanted 1.75x rent, up to 2.75x rent if not filled immediately, after significant negotiation. Hiring a broker myself would have likely cost 1x rent or more anyways with…
The landlord is under no obligation to accept anyone this service finds, so this startup guarantees an outcome they cannot control. It might be a way to build awareness and goodwill, but they are burning VC capital to offer a service that is either fundamentally unsustainable or mispriced.
Thank goodness...and hopefully more competitors (choices) to come in the future. Good luck!