replies(1):
I'm curious if this will be creatively interpreted so that the broker is mandatory but supposedly represents the interests of both LL and tenant, so the tenant has to pay anyway.
The problem with the old system was I was paying a guy who didn’t have any obligation to me. Dual obligations means the broker can at least be sued for a conflict of interest if they hide something or don’t do their job. It’s a step in the right direction.
As you requested.
First, the service is being provided to the landlord (listing, tours, etc.), not the client, for all listings these days (I don't know any young person who has ever used a renter's agent, except maybe if it's provided in a relocation package). The renter has no choice in which broker to use to find/transact w/ the property, so there's very little price pressure for these broker fees.
Second the information asymmetry - the terms of the fee are completely opaque in the listings, and are not disclosed basically until signing unless you press brokers earlier. So there's basically no competitive pressure pushing these fees down, since it's basically a "junk fee" from a user experience perspective tacked on at the very end (and not listed on listings), and the landlord - who IS in a position to negotiate on price - doesn't care.
I don't buy the argument that there will be some long-term price hike in rents as a result of this decision - people who rent for 1-5 years already are paying a MASSIVE "net effective" premium for having an additional month's rent tacked on up front - but also it strongly incentivizes tenant retention (e.g. by being more responsive, keeping prices lower, etc.), because the landlord does not want to have to eat a broker's fee next listing.
If it's in the rent, it's better to amortize the cost of the broker fee over a year vs. pay upfront.
Between the fee + first month's rent + security deposit (+ sometimes an additional month's rent) it is common to have to front 10K - 20K just to get into an apartment here.
- The Speaker, Adrienne Adams, talks about the bill here: https://citymeetings.nyc/city-council/2024-11-13-0130-pm-sta...
- The prime sponsor, Chi Ossé's, comments on the bill: https://citymeetings.nyc/city-council/2024-11-13-0130-pm-sta...
- A vocal opposing voice, Vickie Paladino's, comments on the bill: https://citymeetings.nyc/city-council/2024-11-13-0130-pm-sta...
Even now, when a landlord has a lot of available apartments they need to move or when the market is soft (for example during peak COVID), they’ll typically offer a “1 month OP.” Meaning the landlord pays the broker a 1 month’s rent fee, and the broker markets the apartment to renters as no fee. Even if the landlord just roles that into the rent, it’s a savings over the 12-15% fee standard today.
Also, landlords with larger buildings or geographic density are already figuring out that they can rent apartments cheaper with a few salaried leasing agents, instead of paying brokers. If more of them are forced to internalize the broker fee, more of them will figure that out.
If you have 2 buddies and going on a $5500 3 bedroom in Boston, you'll likely be requested first rent + last rent + deposit + broker fee (=1 rent) = 4 * rent = $22k just to get the keys. That's $7300 per person. This is only to get the key, the next month you pay rent #2.
If you're going on a $4k 1 bedroom by yourself (or with your partner) you'll be hit with 4 * 4=$16k upfront cost, or $8k if you're lucky and have a partner.
Renting is extraordinarily expensive in big cities in the US right now. I'm sometimes surprised people can survive this market. I make ~$150k a year in a lucrative software engineering role, and rent is still too expensive for me. It's very difficult for e.g. teachers, researchers etc making ~$70k a year etc.
Some cities will be cheaper, some will be more expensive. E.g. I know that Philadelphia is particularly cheap when it comes to cost of living. Chicago is expensive, but seems to be slightly cheaper than NYC/Boston etc...
This is a fairly simple concept: you should not be forced to pay a fee for someone who does not have a fiduciary duty to you. The broker works for the landlord. The landlord should pay them. Simple.
There definitely will be a small spike in the cost of rentals, but 1) it will definitely not be a perfect 12-15% transfer from what the fee costs, and 2) I predict that downward price pressure will bring rental costs around what they are now, especially given the prevalence of no fee units. The cost will likely just cut into landlords' revenue, and anyone claiming prices will rise substantially are probably lobbying on behalf of landlords.
One's personal definition could mean $1000/m difference compared to someone else's.
NYC is a place where it's expected you'll always be on a lease - it's not common to go month-to-month after you fulfill your initial obligation (as it is in other cities).
I've heard a common grift here is to offer current tenants awful terms to renew the lease. The broker is banking on you balking, so she gets to tell the owner (who's never met you or even been to the US) "sorry - the existing tenant doesn't want to renew, so you're going to have to pay me to market the apartment again."
"In 2020, interpreting a tenant protection law passed by the legislature, the New York Department of State issued guidance that prohibited brokers hired by landlords from charging tenants. The Real Estate Board of New York challenged the restriction in a lawsuit, resulting in a state court overturning the ban in 2021."
https://council.nyc.gov/shaun-abreu/2024/06/11/the-city-what....
I imagine some other cities have done the same.
Where I live, in a desirable Manhattan neighborhood with an old building stock, you can find a decent 1-bedroom for around $3500/mo and move in for a total of $7k. If you hunt for a deal and can make a few sacrifices, you can bring that down to $6k.
At least the arguments up top have obvious perverse incentives.
Given the average price for an NYC apartment at north of $3k, the cost to a landlord of complying with the law even once looks significantly higher than the cost of the paying the fine.
1) Free market apartments: with tenants not having to pay broker fees up front, LLs can and will come up with workarounds. E.g. 'move-in-fee' of 5k or a 'move-out' fee. They will be able to charge more, especially on renewal leases.
2) Rent regulated apartments: LLs can't play those games, but they can say 'only available if you hire such and such a broker', or they might only list the apartments on a website that operates on a subscription basis where they get a cut somehow. Or, at the margins, this is a significant cost for money-losing units, so they might just add those units to the list of units permanently off the market.
I do expect brokerage fees to decline somewhat, and this may affect pricing for streeteasy and zillow and the other advertising portals, but this is not going to be a huge change, and is going to hurt a bunch of low-income tenants.
oh no, that's horrible! what are these websites? just so i dont accidentally click on any, can you give me their names / links
And more likely, the vehicles these brokers depend on like Zillow, etc, will end up bearing the burden of enforcement more than individual renters reporting to agencies.
People aren't dumb and look at an apartment and get quoted $4k a month and when they go sign they realize its an extra $6k broker fee and just open up their wallets like "whoops". It's definitely factored into the price and affects who gets in to the door
What happens now is that instead of a tenant paying $5K to the broker when they rent the place, the landlord pays $500 to a service which lists the apartment in a few places (like StreetEasy) and handles showing the apartment (which can often be offloaded to the super or similar). It's not even a "broker" at this point, it's just a service. Like how with existing no-fee buildings, it's just one more thing the management office does.
> I do expect brokerage fees to decline somewhat... but this is not going to be a huge change
Decline? Broker's fees, along with brokerages, are practically going to disappear (for the rental market). I don't know a single person who's actually gotten value out of using a broker, because everyone just finds the apartment they want on StreetEasy or whatever first.
This is going to be a gigantic change. And I have no idea why you think it would hurt low-income tenants? You're removing a huge fee they had to pay.
Oh, mine didn't even bother with that. He cashed the commission cheque and flew to Paris the night before. True story.
I was so furious about having to pay someone I didn't hire that we almost lost the apartment; I covered the security deposit while my partner paid the broker.
Remember, broker's fees don't go to the landlord. They go to the brokers! The only reason landlords use them is because they're free for the landlord.
It's absolutely cheaper for the landlord to hire a service than to pay a fine.
Of course there was zero chance. Real estate agents regularly refuse to show homes to or entertain offers from buyers that are not represented by a real estate agent (unless they’re hoping to represent the buyer too - then they get both commissions!).
“I never would have been able to do business in a monopolized market without doing business with a monopolist.”
"She believes the bill will force housing units to go unadvertised, limiting transparency and opportunities for tenants"
Very few units/buildings are no fee. And because so few are, there isn't much competitive pressure to reduce or remove the fees, because it's really hard to find a no-fee apartment that meets your other criteria. Hence, the new law.
Why do landlords think they need a broker in order to rent out their units in NYC? I would think demand is so high there that listings on all the regular-suspect listing sites would be more than sufficient to get their units rented quickly and at a price they're happy with.
No-fee listings seem to be a thing in NYC, but appear to be for a small minority of units.
Our realtor's expertise was useful when we were making an offer, and when dealing with financing and paperwork, but I don't think she provided $50k of value. If I were paying a fairly generous hourly rate for her time, she would have made less than $5k.
Sure, sometimes a buyer's agent spends 100 hours helping their clients, finding and showing property after property after property, and has to deal with tricky negotiations, and is maybe worth the 2.5% commission.
But I don't want to pay $50k for 10-15 hours of work; that's ridiculous. (And of course I was paying for the seller's agent's commission as well.)
Another house I was involved in buying was similar: second house we looked at, only one counter-offer needed.
If/when I buy again I will likely not use an agent. The new rules around not foisting the commissions onto the buyer will help too.
Now, I believe since the National Association of Realtors is not allowed to require their selling agents to share their commission with buyers’ agents, that everything is up for negotiation, and home buyers can save money by not using agents.
Real estate agents don't even do that; a dedicated title company will take care of this aspect of it.
After doing a few real estate purchases with realtors, I've come to the conclusion that they're not really necessary as a buyer, unless you really need/want someone to hold your hand the whole way. The offer and purchase forms are standardized by the state realtor's association (technically they are not free to use, but you can find them online), and the seller will be responsible for filling out all the disclosure forms and whatnot, which you just have to sign that you acknowledge receipt.
As I said, the title company (often also the escrow company) will handle all the title-related stuff. Your mortgage lender will help you fill out the mortgage application, and either the title company or a notary hired by the mortgage lender will walk you through signing the final forms. In states (like NY) where you're required(?) to have an attorney when you're buying property, I feel like a realtor is even more superfluous.
On the seller side, I do believe realtors provide quite a bit more value. Whether or not it's enough to justify their commission is of course up for debate.
Regarding rentals, yeah... before buying I lived in 9 different rentals (upstate NY, SF bay area, SF), and at no point did I need any third party to help with it, even when several of these were before the prevalence of listings on the internet. Find listing, contact landlord and/or attend open house, submit application, sign lease, done. There were certainly some rentals I didn't end up getting due to high demand, but that's life.
Second, to the extent there is monopolistic behavior that gets in the way (and there definitely is), that's not what I'm talking about. The market that year was completely insane because of the interest rates, and there is no way we could have navigated it ourselves, real estate agent monopoly or no monopoly.
I'm very glad that they've been forced to allow competition, and most real estate agents are horrible and should be avoided. All I'm saying is that in some markets a good real estate agent is absolutely worth their commission.
Or just put any full url path including http(s) after archive.is/ to skip to the search for that url.
The controversy is created by the people who have something to lose by it passing, and they somehow manage to fool voters into believing their bullshit "but regular people will be hurt because X!" justifications. And voters for some reason don't look at the background of the people who support or oppose these sorts of things to see where their interests are aligned.
I don't really know how we get to the point where we have an educated, informed electorate, where people are resistant to misinformation, and think critically about what a yes or no vote actually means, filtering out arguments made by people with sneaky ulterior motives.
Personally I think people should be strongly discouraged from voting on issues that they don't understand. When I fill out my ballot (California & SF, so there are always quite a few ballot propositions), I try to do my best to read about each proposition, arguments for and against, and take at least a cursory look at the people doing that arguing, but honestly there are still probably some I should leave blank, as I don't fully understand the consequences of a yes/no.
> you should not be forced to pay a fee for someone who does not have a fiduciary duty to you
This is one reason why I'm glad real estate purchase commissions are getting shaken up (the other is breaking up monopoly abuse). The current/previous commissions structure is bonkers.
Landlords can list their units on whatever listing sites/services for like $500 a pop, and renters won't have to pay $5k-$10k to a broker who did basically nothing for them.
Rents will not go up; rents are a function of what the market will bear, not of a landlord's costs.
I have never seen a situation where the broker is responsible for the lease terms, because in the end the landlord has to sign their end.
They ultimately provide a lot of value to landlord — paying for marketing, showing the apartment to a bunch of people, answering the NYU student’s parents questions about crime in the neighborhood, making sure that applicants have provided all the right paperwork, etc etc.
The best part is that as a renter, just before you hand over the many thousand dollar check, you sign a piece of paper that says “this person you are paying does not work for you or represent your interests in any way in this transaction.”
My read is that as long as a broker works with multiple landlords, you the tenant will still pay them a fee. And it might remain difficult to find available lodging without going through brokers.
[0] https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-real-estate-covid-more-ap...
If a tenant hires his own agent to find an apartment, that agent would (a) represent the tenant and (b) the tenant would pay for that service.
But I'm not sure what stops the landlords from just raising the rent to cover the broker fees. Unless there's enough competition from landlords who don't use brokers.
They're less necessary now... as long as you're willing to wait a few weeks for your be car to arrive. Most people aren't, or can't.
In NYC, it probably ties back to organized crime somewhow.
My prediction is this will increase rents in high-demand neighborhoods because the prices today in those neighborhoods have been discounted to account for the broker fees. I’m talking the rental rate. Will it go up enough to where it’s more expensive than if there’d been a broker fee? Depends on how long the tenant stays.
Sometimes it seems like they are the only governments that can!
I am not arguing that it will end up in the rent. I was only arguing that, if it did, that would still be a better arrangement.
However, you are wrong that the service provided by the fee offers no value, and that the fee will not end up somewhere (even in a diminished way).
- To landlords it offers upfront vetting, no required face time with prospects, and less work to land a tenant. We have a 1.4% vacancy rate in NYC -- apartments on the market will have hundreds of interested people and multiple applications. Landlords basically manage none of this.
- To prospective renters who actively hire a broker -- and these do exist, I did this once -- it offers zero time on the prospect's part to look for, schedule, and research units. You tell the broker your parameters, they will do the research, and then set up a multi-hour tour of apartments.
(Unless you are only looking at no-fee apartments, you are better off just hiring a broker so you get at least some value from it if you rent a fee-ful apartment)
The value the fee provides to the people who care about it, will end up somewhere. This work doesn't go away. Many landlords and prospective renters will take on the work themselves, but many won't.
These people will pay for the broker fee. Those broker fees end up with the landlord or the prospective renter.
It is not my conclusion that eliminating the broker fee will result in higher rent. I think what will happen is:
- The broker market will shrink.
- Some landlords or renters will pay for it.
In a nutty housing market like NYC's, there is actual value provided by brokers, to some people.
Finally -- to be clear, I'm not arguing against the FARE Act. I am fully supportive of it and wish this happened years ago.
Because they know that the fee will be paid by the tenant, so why not?
> I live in SF and I've never heard of such a thing here
BTW brokers are very common in SF as well, usually called "leasing agent" or something similar. Every non-corporate rental I ever looked at had a broker involved at some level, e.g. organizing open houses, doing private tours, sending out application forms, vetting applicants, sending out lease agreements. It's just that you as the tenant don't have to know or care because you aren't the one footing the bill.
What's more, the way it's worked up until now the landlord has many brokers to choose from. And brokers (especially in NYC) will have at least a dozen different folks who will want pretty much any decent apartment. Which allows the broker to charge outrageous fees because most landlords don't want to deal with the hoi polloi, just the folks vetted by the broker.
As such, the power asymmetry between renter and broker was astounding. Changing this will be good for the renter, that's for sure.
Brokers won't be able to get as much commission per apartment because the landlords will put the brokers on a flat fee annual retainer or something similar, because they have power (because they control the available inventory) to choose which broker(s) to work with.
All in all, it won't be so good for the brokers. Too bad. So sad. /s
I think the reason it was listed as a "no fee" apartment is because the brokerage is the de facto landlady.
As the person who told me about this grift explained, this is not an uncommon relationship.
These situations are created and maintained by real estate agents because they want to keep themselves useful.
There's no reason we can't get a push notification to our phone when a house matching our criteria gets listed locally. Open app, check it out, decide to move on it or pass.
The only reason real estate agents are helpful is because they've created their own system that they control.
Rental brokers are useless, and their fees often exceed 1 month rent (15% of annual rent, so $5k/mo apartment you’re paying first month $5k, deposit $5k, and $9k brokers fee).
I also own the apartment I live in. But before I owned my residence, I was a renter, and thus for a period I've also experienced the mad crazy dash that is NYC apartment hunting while in the shoes of a prospective renter.
My impressions from my "lived experience" in case anyone finds it an interesting data point:
There isn't much information asymmetry, if any. Most apartments are marketed through brokers, and everyone understands, apartment seekers especially, that the broker will charge a fee that the renter must pay to the broker, and how much that fee is. In contrast, when landlords advertise their apartments without a broker, they specify in the ad that it is on a "no fee" basis. Anyone hunting for an apartment to rent who doesn't understand this at the outset of their search learns it soon enough, and certainly before they sign a lease.
My intuition is the bill requiring owners to pay the broker's fee, if it becomes law, will have little or no effect on the underlying economics. I expect the law will prove to have been mere theater, albeit perhaps theater that was "well intentioned," to borrow from a Mayor Adams' quotation in the Bloomberg article.
When I've decided what rent prices to advertise my apartments for, I've always assumed renters will pay the most they can afford to "satisfice" the apartment characteristics they seek. I've also assumed they will factor any broker's fee into deciding whether they can afford any specific apartment.
Whenever I've marketed an apartment myself, I've advertised a higher price than I would were I to advertise it through a broker, and vice versa. The rule of thumb I've used for how much to add to the monthly rent I advertise when I'm doing it without a broker, is what a broker's fee would be if I were using a broker (which is typically 15% of the first year's rent) divided by 12.
As far as I can tell, the negotiations and transactions that actually have transpired after I've marketed my apartments with and without brokers in the foregoing manner have matched the mental model of the market that I've relied on to estimate what prices to advertise.
If the new bill becomes law and thereby requires me to pay any broker fee myself, I plan to do the reverse. I'll ask for a higher price when I market one of my apartments through a broker than when I market it myself. I also expect the monthly differential I'll choose when doing it myself will continue be roughly the hypothetical broker's fee divided by 12.
I'm pretty sure there are landlords that charge the brokers for the chance to show their units. The landlords can advertise rents that are $300 lower (but get a $500 cut of the broker fee), and then can raise the rent by $300 the next year, increasing the chance that the tenant will go to another one of their (or their buddy's) properties and pay another brokers fee.
That situation wasn't created by real estate agents, it was created by sub-inflation mortgage interest rates, and she solved it by deeply understanding what a home seller wants out of an offer. That's what a real estate agent is good for, and it's what I hope a larger percentage of agents are going to be good at now that the bad ones can't hide behind their monopoly.
NYC is all about optimizing the grift.
Imagine a small-time landlord that owns six 20-unit 6-story buildings across Queens. When 1/3 of their inventory turns over in September (the busy time for apartments in NYC), do you think they want to run all over the borough to 500 showings until they finally get all of the units rented? Do you think they want to hire a staff that will show all the units? Hell no! They can, FOR FREE, just tell one (or several!) brokers, "if you manage to rent this unit out, you get to charge whatever fee you can get them to collect." And then they just need to do some paperwork when the broker finally lands someone.
Previously landlords would require renters to work with (and pay) the broker, so there was no incentive to choose a cheaper broker.
How does that change if the landlord pays it? The renter still hasn't chosen the broker.
And either way, it comes from rent money.
This feels no different from pricing that hides sales tax, versus reveals it.
How about getting rid of these fucking agents.
That's as may be, but the law in question is specifically about rentals not sales. WRT rentals, the price is generally not negotiable, the terms (at least in NYC) are prescribed by at least three city and state agencies, and until now, despite the fact that the broker acted as the landlord's agent exclusively, anyone who signed a lease (as the tenant) had to pay the broker.
That's a very different situation, and not analogous to buying a home, except that (usually) you will live there.
Edit: Fixed typo. Clarified prose.
That's not going to happen. Such fees (at least in the US, AFAICT) are in most cities.
Besides, hotels are for tourists. And a tourist's job is to spend as much money as the city can get them to cough up. And that's true of every city/destination.
Actually, we had these arcane things called "newspapers" that were filled with hundreds and hundreds of ads for apartment/house rentals, sales and even shares.
You figured out what you could afford and went through these arcane things and marked the ones that interested you. Then you gasp made a phone call to find out:
1. If the place is still available;
2. When can you come to look at it;
3. If you like it, snap it up (by writing a check[0]) before someone else does.
As for brokers, the ads generally noted that it was 'no fee' if the rental was direct with the landlord. Apartment shares were generally 'no fee' as well, since you were just moving in with roommates you didn't know.
I had some really weird experiences looking for both shares and apartments back in the 1980s and 90s. But it wasn't all that difficult or that much more time consuming than using the real estate websites these days. They're essentially the same thing, except with more photos.
If you install the Archive Page addon Firefox[0]/Chrome[1] (I don't use Chrome, but the FF version works nicely) you can right-click on any link and select 'search link', or you can click 'archive link' which will queue the link for archival if it has not already been archived.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/archive-page/
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/archive-page/gcaimh...
Since then I've bought a house without an agent and am about to sell another. All you really need is a lawyer and the internet. Then there are services you can pay to get on MLS.
IMO, RE agents hosed themselves by not self scaling down their commission percentages as prices went up. Even people who do want their help will balk at paying someone 20k-30k+.
When I sell things, even large value things like houses/boats/cars, it's the most money with the least amount of hassle in that order that wins out. I'd love to know more deeply what I really want when selling something.
This is a different problem than "the service provided isn't valuable".
Year Units Built Population Change (Number)
2019 26,900 -80,967
2020 23,000 +641,579
2021 24,000 -250,184
2022 24,000 -181,326
2023 27,980 -101,984
Last 5 years not much change in supply, but demand varies.
(based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_(stat...)
Charitably rereading your comment - this agent sounds like they were a buying agent. Which should 100% be a real thing; but nothing like a real estate agent and more like a family lawyer / family financial adviser / family hostage negotiator all rolled into one.
You also can't charge an agent fee for merely giving someone access to a database, and you can't be both the agent and the landlord, nor the agent and the previous tenant.
Unfortunately, the difficult housing market ended up creating all sorts of other bribes. The most common is the previous tenant selling their furniture for an exhorbitant fee, or straight up requesting a bribe. These are obviously illegal, and you would be entitled to keep the apartment even after getting your money back in court. However rights are of little importance if you don't have the time/energy/means to enforce them. It's also a bad way to start a relationship with a landlord.
German law is firmly on the side of tenants, but sometimes the greed is just too strong, and there is an endless supply of applicants who are willing to compromise.
More info here: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/housing-scams#scams-by-lan...
And the last thing a landlord generally wants is for their tenant of just one year to leave. Remember, an apartment will often go vacant for a month or even two between tenants, which is lost rent.
And if your tenant leaves, chances are miniscule they happen to move to another property you happen to own. (And what does a "buddy's" property have to do with anything?)
(That's assuming apartments even stay empty that long; when we were searching, we almost always had to commit to an apartment the day of the showing, or it'd be off the market the next day. Apartments seem to stay empty long enough for the required cleaning and maintenance to take place - and sometimes barely even that long, we've viewed apartments that were being actively worked on.)
This is what will likely happen with this law.
The prior system was that the person who hired the broker (the property owner) didn't care how high their fee was unless it caused them to lose a lease, since they weren't paying. So the incentive was for brokers to figure out how much money they could charge before they started blowing up deals for the person that hired them. If tenants would begrudgingly pay several thousand dollars to get the apartment, that is what they would charge. It was a race to the price ceiling since the payer wasn't the consumer. e.g. Owners don't care if one broker charges $2k, and one charges $3k, since as long as either can get a good tenant, they don't care.
Now, their pricing structure has to be directly in line with the property owners incentives. Property owners aren't going to swallow paying thousands of dollars to an agent for unlocking a door and processing an application (there are apps for both of those things that get it done for 10s of dollars). Now, it will be a race to the best price for the service. If one agent is asking $3k and the other is asking $2k, the owner will choose the one who is asking $2k, or more likely, save themselves $2k and do the work themselves.
This is why increasing the supply is so important too. Lawmakers like to overestimate the impact of their laws.
But banning fees is so much easier than building house/going against your paymasters.
We had a similar fee ban in England too. Has it moved the needle on the overall rental situation? I don't believe so
I wouldn't pay more than around $200 to have someone find me a tenant. Certainly not in landlord's market. It shouldn't be more than an hour or two of clerical work to talk to some people and sift through some applications.
So yeah, if landlords have to cash out for this, the broker racket in NYC is likely going to be fucked. Landlords are going to be sticker shocked; I don't see why they would be willing to paying four-digit figures in a market where tenants are not rare unicorns that have to be searched for high and low, and wooed.
The fees are about to not be that high, this rule change just passed this week.
The landlords are about to care about broker fees now that they are the ones getting ripped off. I suspect that the entire landlord broker industry is about to cease to exist overnight. It will look a lot like rentals in most other American cities where no such job exists, and finding a tenant is all handled by whoever manages the property.
Firstly, I was talking about goings on 30-40 years ago, and GP's (incorrect) assertion that "In the past, there was some informational benefit for average Joe/Jane. Without internet, finding apartments, knowing which neighborhoods, buildings, or landlords were good or not was quite difficult." It was not.
As far as checks are concerned, I've been paying by check. The last time was for this month's rent.
Regardless, and I'll say it a second time in this message as you, apparently, missed it in the first message, my previous message was replying to the assertion that back in the 1980s/90s, it was much harder to find/get an apartment than now. It ain't true. I was there. I did it repeatedly.
The only real difference is that I don't have to go out and get the Village Voice or Sunday papers for the expanded classified ad pages. Oh, and more photos on the websites.
Edit: I went and checked and you, ics, were the GP to whom I referred. Please re-read my initial reply to you -- you obviously misunderstood.
If I'm renting out a place, and it turns out that the renter is being charged some exorbitant $2000 fee, that would severely bother me. I would advise the tenant not to pay, and give them the place anyway. The crooked broker could then try to get it from me; at most I'd give them $200, take it or leave it.
Actually, another thing, the current system described creates an opportunity for fraud. What if the landlord and broker are not at arm's length? A landlord could set up a fake brokerage operation and just pocket the fee.
If we frame the new law as not "landlord pays the fee", but "tenant does not see a fee (unless they retain a broker themselves)" then in that light it makes even more sense. If the tenant does not see a fee, then there is no space for such collusion.
"In the past, there was some informational benefit for average Joe/Jane. Without internet, finding apartments, knowing which neighborhoods, buildings, or landlords were good or not was quite difficult."
Which I helpfully quoted at the beginning of my reply. I then (at the end of my comment) clarified that I was talking about 30-40 years ago.
I suppose if GGP has just as poor reading comprehension as you appear to have, they might have gotten confused. Which would be a shame.
That said, I assume at least a modicum of English proficiency and reading comprehension skills when posting here. Perhaps I should reevaluate that assumption.
However you are right. We need more apartments. The population is growing and they need a place to live. If you want to solve the aging population problem through immigration, you need to house those immigrants somewhere.