New York City Council Votes to End Broker Fees Squeezing Renters

While I do agree with the spirit of this, doesn't this mean that any fees that brokers require will be included in the rent?

Landlords who have many apartments to rent every year have a lot more leverage over brokers than renters who are generally renting at the very most once a year. So when landlords are forced to pay the fee that have more optionality to negotiate the fee down.

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.

Not a New Yorker here, can someone ELI5 (briefly, I don't want to waste your time) what function brokers serve other than extracting money from people? I know a real estate agent at least takes care of a great deal of paperwork that must be done correctly in the transfer of title, and shows properties to buyers. But in terms of rentals, I've never needed a third party to do any of that, and I lived in 5 rental apartments in about 8 years. Landlords 'just' list their properties on the Internet, people find said properties and submit applications or go see them at a predefined time. I'm aware of property managers and have dealt with them in cases where the landlord doesn't want to bother interviewing tenants and stuff -- is a broker a subset of these functions? I think of a property manager though as also serving the function of arranging repairs and handling the whole tenant relationship. In my experience, a property manager does charge a percentage of the rent to handle all this, which kind of means it's passed on, but in terms of how the broader market contains competitors who aren't paying a property manager constrains how much it can be fully passed onto the tenant.