Charging to tour rental properties...

Just had to do this a few weeks ago. They have you taken a pic of your driver's license, provide your SSN & run a credit check on the spot. Then they charge you to tour the place.

A very "fuck you, I'm getting paid regardless" mentality from rental companies.

My wife and I were looking at realtors and one told us we would need to provide our credit card info to look at properties, and I just laughed and said "go fuck yourself" and hung up.
The only valid response, IMO.
The fact that people actually pay this shit is infuriating.
- I had someone actually try to get me to pay to see rental property well. Mine were a little mote greedy and wanted $30.
  I told them I work too hard for my money to be handing it out like party favors.

What the actual fuck

Last few months... Grifting has seriously accelerated
- Companies have been accelerating their grifting at an alarming rate since the COVID days
Just more rent seeking behavior.

But you suuuurely tip when you look at a rental?

Did you tip when you wrote this comment?
- Of course, but I unfortunately cannot tip you because my payment processor doesn't allow to tip NSFW comments.
- I've got a tip for you.
  (I'm referring to the tip of my penis.)
There’s a 20% suggested tip on the $250 non refundable application deposit?
- $250 non refundable application deposit?
  LMAO I'd sooner torch the rental property than pay just to APPLY to hopefully live there.

If they nickel and dime simple visitors like that, I can only imagine what they do to the people who actually rent the place.

If this weren’t such a huge red flag, I’d just knock on the door and pay the current tenant $5.
- Might get a coffee out of it

Rents are too high for a single income to cover anymore, so I’ve been looking for roommates. Even the websites about finding roommates expect you to pay.

To be clear, they have a free tier - but unless you pay, you can’t read the messages you receive. You can read the first line, but the rest is locked. I gave up with one place because the boomer trying to rent a room refused to send me an email. I told him three times to please just email me his message because I couldn’t read it on the site, but because he could read messages fine, he thought it was a setting he had to change. He kept responding with “Okay try now” and didn’t seem to understand that he can’t “settings” other people out from behind a paywall.

All he had to do was copy/paste his message and send it a different way, but he wouldn’t do it. I eventually gave up because the thought of living with someone that’s unable to follow such simple directions sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.

Anyway, point is, even if you’re so poor that you need to seek out roommates, you’re still expected to pay a subscription. I don’t even know what to do anymore.

Sounds like a market ready for disruption
- In the romulan disruptor kind of way?
- Isn’t this what Craigslist is for?
If you were replying with an email address odds are he was not getting it due to the site actively trying to keep people on their site.
- Absolutely. A site charging to read messages will most definitely censor out emails and phone numbers and will have it in their ToS that you're not allowed to take conversations outside the platform.
- Probably. Not much I can do. I’m not paying for a subscription. If anyone has any advice for finding roommates otherwise, I would very much appreciate it!
What is this app actually called? I can't id it from screenshot, and every comment here seems to be talking about it without actually naming it.
- Oh, I'm talking about roommate-seeking websites I've personally attempted to use, which were whatever non-sketchy-looking options came up on DuckDuckGo. I have no idea what OP's post is from.

Just people making passive income guys, nothing to see here.

We once heard of a service that would help us find a rental house. So we went there, had to pay for an appointment. Turns out they do nothing you cannot do yourself, and you pay a lot. They literally just put you in the system, which you can do yourself, and when you get a house through that system, which is free and from the government, they make you pay through the nose for that house.

Of course, since I am native in this country I have no need for a service like that. Turns out they mostly do this to people who don't speak the language. I guess they offer a service, but their fees are excessive for what they do. They abuse the fact those people don't know any better.

There's lots of people making a profit from somebody else's house finding misery and I hate it.

God I love capitalism. Insert SpongeBob shouting meme
my parent went through that service, except they were trying rent out the other house, they are rich by any means. but it was the same process the agents basically did nothing, just put your house in thier database thats it.
Sounds like France. There's a whole industry of people charging a months rent or more just to make a few phone calls and assemble some basic documents. Not easy to rent a place by any means, but these providers do not offer a good value because they are not actually real estate agents.
This reminds me of the Italian websites that resell tickets for exhibits that can be purchased much cheaper directly from the exhibit's actual website. The exhibit sites tend to be in Italian only or are more difficult to find.

Hah what are you going to do, buy a house instead? We're all fucked once this is the norm.

I don't know if this applies in the US but multiple people can take out a mortgage against the same property. If you have 3/4 trustworthy friends then you can pool your money to buy a place. It's complicated but better to invest your money in your own property than to line the pockets of cunt landlords and letting agents.
- That would require people to have three to four close friends that could tolerate their presence. That's an exceedingly rare thing in the US as we're mostly all intolerable cunts.
- And bam, new laws come out that makes it illegal for more than X people who aren't related to each other to share a home.
  This is actually a thing in many places so people can't do what you just described, isn't American Freedumb so beautiful
- Co-ownership is kind of a horrible idea overall. What happens when one of the 4 people wants to use the property as collateral for a loan?
  Not to mention that this promotes increase in property costs without fixing the issue. If the norm is to continue pooling money between individuals then real estate can continue to raise prices. Then you just need 6 friends 10 friends 14 friends etc. we need a market crash and we need corporate residential ownership to be heavily regulated.
- Create a trust instead.
  Contact an attorney to draft a trust where you all share equity at an amount you all agree to. The terms of the trust should indicate how someone sells their interest and what happens upon default, etc.
  The trust buys the property and owns it. Ownership is managed through the trust.
  The hardest part is qualifying for a loan. You're essentially operating as a business and most home loans are designed for people and couples.
- I knew people who did this after college with an apartment building. Not sure that's feasible these days but that seems like it would be much easier to transition out of than a roommate situation.
I haven't really had any delusions that I'll ever be able to afford to buy a house anyway, but I'm kind of at the point where I don't even want to.

This has gotta be some NYC shit

In a region near me the rental market is 99.3% full.
Scumbag landlords charge $200 to view these horrid places no one will ever rent, and their job is showing people the place, one after another. It's only a half-dozen a day, but that's a good wage and there's no end of hopefuls. Apparently, needing a landlord to come out to show you the place is a "call-out", even if he's just upstairs.
Of course that's the "frbo" market; the rental companies can't get away with that yet. They wish, though.
- Well if you have 5 vacant units artificial scarcity is pretty easy to achieve by only putting one to market at a time.
- In a region near me the rental market is 99.3% full.
  I hear that from every landlord in every market, whether the economy is booming or shrinking and people are coming or going.
  I have never been quoted an occupancy rate less than 90%. I've been in buildings under construction and heard "Yes, we've already leased most of our units! You're getting the last ones! So lucky!"
- Wait so the people who refuse to go with those big companies (aren’t there principled folks like that, maybe they have a name I’m forgetting) have to deal with that instead?
  It was like people who have to pay some fee I thought… searches oh it’s the no broker fee people. So do no broker fee ppl often pay viewing fees? And viewing fees are legal?

Do the unlimited and have constant tours for all 30 days. Get friends to individually do the same. Pester the ever living fuck out of them.

r/maliciouscompliance
Oops, bad habit.¯(ツ)/¯
- You should make a Lemmy alternative. Could become useful, you know, with all the ongoing fascism.

See, you pay us for the privilege of being considered as a candidate to pay us.

Why would they sell/rent when they make so much money on tours?

I mean really just spruce up one unit, charge for tours, charge for applications, why even bother renting?
I mean places already charge just to submit an app.
- People do that, its pretty clear cut fraud though so it usually doesnt work out the best in the end.
The idea is proably just to filter out people who aren't serious / not gonna show up.
I can't imgine it's about the money
- Its common to pay a down payment to hold a rental, this is just a shittier version of that.

Nobody tell OP about rental application fees, they'll explode.

If we can get people to do it near landlords we might fix the system
- .....or we could raise our children to not be landlords.
This is 100% worse, though. Both should come with being shot in the street as punishment but at least application fees is paying for something you want and not paying to see if you even want it at all.

This is why I'll boondock until its completely illegal. Then if they don't force me into the gray pod then I'm going feral hobo until I die in a fight with a racoon over some berries.

I’m going feral hobo until I die in a fight with a racoon over some berries.
Stop, my brother! We are not enemies! There is enough berry for all, if we but put down our differences and turn our attention to the dreaded hording bourgeois!
- I know this is funny, but to anyone reading this comment, I implore you:
What's the biggest thing you miss? The idea certainly appeals to me; you have to pay to exist as a person but there's free parking everywhere. And you can do a bit of nomadism.
- A nice shitter and a bathtub. I have a toilet and do shit in the woods as much as possible. But a reliable porcelain throne feels great. I can realese some genuine horrors and its just gone in a flush or two. I also like just laying down in a nice hot bath with some bubble bath, little scented Epsom salt, drink a beer and smoke a j.

agencies: "housing is just not unaffordable enough. I wonder what else we can do to contribute?"

I want to shit down the neck stump of whoever came up with this

So, I think a decade or so ago (maybe more), the bigger corpos went full mask off, and stopped even pretending they cared about anything but making more money. Screw the employees, screw the customer, screw the regulatory departments. Money only.

It seems this is filtering down to more and more businesses.

I am not sure how it is over there. Here in the UK the number of rental properties has dropped drastically. I suspect, it's because of a few changes legally here that make it not quite so lucrative to buy-to-let any more. In any case, rather than bring house prices down, it just made the rentals still on the market go up in price. As an example today for my postcode there are over 80 properties for sale (excluding retirement/shared properties) and only around 10 for rent with the same filters. It used to be closer to half the number of rental properties up until around 5 or so years ago.

If there's a seller's (well landlord's/renter's I guess) market, they could for sure make people pay to get an edge on gaining an increasingly rare rental. It's downright scummy. But, I expect nothing less any more.

In some cases, arson is morally perfectly justifiable.

Why do we even need people to show us apartments. My best experience when looking for a my last apartment was a place that had a automated system, you scan your drivers license for verification, their app gives you the address and the time to visit, when you get there it gives you a lockbox code that will contain the keys to the apartment, you check the apartment out and return the keys to the lockbox on your way out, this should be the default for every rental apartment visit. Every agent I had to deal with was less than useful, this industry needs to die.

How do they defend against abuse? Like if someone steals a toaster on their visit how do you know if it was person 1 or person 5 who visited that day? Do they have to have someone to check after each visit? Why don’t they just do the viewing?
- I'm talking about empty apartments and I assume someone comes to check up the state of the apartment once a day or more
- I assumed the apartments being showed were empty.

Well I need the 24/7 phone and chat support. What if I have a question about my ability to tour a property at 2am?

It would be tempting to get that plan and call them at the stupidest hours possible. But it’s probably outsourced to India or just AI
- It’s outsourced to what the company calls AI however it’s just some people in India. Everyone except for you is making money in that scenario.

Mao did one thing right

Decrease the surplus population?
Solved the housing crisis by lowering demand! It's cheaper and easier!
- It's weird to see people pile on Mao for a massive regional famine but blink right past the Rape of Nanjing.
  Extra surreal when you know how many millions Chang-Kei Shek butchered before he was forced off the mainland.
  Even more so when you consider the explosion in wealth and prosperity enjoyed by a country that ended the 1940s with 400M people and entered the 2000s with 1.3B
  This, as Western nations in the current decade have engineered famines from Haiti to Libya to Gaza to Afghanistan.
Died?

Soon you'll have to buy a subscription to tour rental houses.

I don't even blame that at this point.

Useful idiots were always proud to pay for shit they could be getting for free, why would they all of a sudden get mad about it?

Remember to pay your netflix subscription instead of using free streaming sites that require no sign up, no credit card, and have more content.

Is this real?

Is anybody actually going to pay this? I'm limited in how mad I can get over someone deluding themselves.

Is anybody actually going to pay this?
I'm sure someone will. It's a relatively small amount of money compared to, say, rent itself. And if you think you're getting some material benefit from the service, you could be gulled into it.
I'm more curious to see if this becomes "normal". Like, if a cartel of rental agencies all decide they're not getting enough in referrals and need to juice their profits directly from the customer, then this pops up everywhere.
- At one point I worked in a role where I helped people with tech issues, including getting printing and scanning done for documents that needed to be signed.
  I regularly had people coming with letters to potential landlords for printing/signing/scanning, thanking the landlord for the opportunity to view a rental, noting the listed rent, and offering a higher rent and/or a cash gift if they were the tenant who was selected.
  Very illegal and scummy, exploiting desperate people and families. This app feels like the codifying of that shady landlord behaviour.
- I sure wouldn't. If anything it sounds like these rentals will be worse than the free to look at ones. It's only 5 bucks, but it's 5 bucks.
  The rental market is fairly competitive, but tips on everything has a similar feel and seems to be a continuing trend, so you never know.
They may end up having to, because the landlord will only take 'verified renters'. So unless you're the only one making a bid, you will never get the property.

This is some immo-portal service, right?

This is wild, but I have at least one guess where they might be coming from with this idea.

At one point I had to move out of a house that I owned for a while so I wanted to let it.

People who want to rent can be super flaky and dishonest. Seriously 4 out of 5 or more are like this.

They make appointments then don't show up and ghost you. Or they call 5 minutes late to say they'll be there in 3 hours.

Or everything seems good until you do credit checks and find they were evicted from the last place and haven't made a payment on their credit card for 3 years plus they have a felony conviction from a few years ago for beating up some guy.

Or when checking their income is sufficient, their boss says yeah, they used to work here but not anymore.

Potential renters never tell you this stuff until you already put hours into talking and going out to show the place to them.

I'm just a regular guy with a job (who does pay his bills) so this takes a lot of time, fuck that noise.

Basically charging people $5 will make them not come if they know they won't qualify, saving everybody the time.

From the renters perspective they have the risk of paying money to find out that the rental post was misleading, the location is crappy, etc. on top of their wasted time.
Charging for an application that involves paying a third party to process? Sketchy, but understandable.
Charging for them to even look at the property? Ridiculous.
- I agree, shitty landlords exist as well and try to scam people into coming. That's why I'll never rent out a place again, on either side, if I can avoid it.
- If it's mealy five bucks, refundable on contract fee to weed out the unserious, I'm fine with that. Look at your own example, "location is crappy". That's on the person looking if they couldn't figure that out ahead of time. I can see a rental post being misleading, but having rented a dozen or so places, never seen anything unexpected.
  Ever sold anything on FaceBook Marketplace? Do NOT put anything out there for free. You'll be overrun by assholes, just as in the post you're replying to. If you charge $5 or $10, those people actually show up.
If it’s so much work for you, sell the house. It’s not like you’re living in it. Income takes work. It sounds like you want people to just give you money while you’re not working.
- It could be they were in the process of relocating, but didn't want to committ in a new city until they had a feel for it, renting the house in the old city while you rent an apartment in the new city until you decide on where you want to live is a very economical way to handle such a relocation, then you can be pickier about the new house purchase and you have more flexibility in buyers for the old house if you don't have to sell the old house before you can buy the new one
  I might do something similar for my upcoming move. Although I would much prefer to make it a $20 deposit to tour. Structure it as "if I have to deny you I'll keep it, but it will be returned upon approving your application" cuts out the bullshit but doesn't cost honest renters money ultimately
And all of those people still need housing which is made more difficult when people own more properties than they need to live in.
Boo fucking hoo it requires a bit of work to be a landlord.

We're missing some critical data here.

The price is really low. Not in a value proposition way but looking at minimum wage...

If you have an agent that drives to the rental property, talks to you let you in walks around with you for 15 minutes maybe

That's $5 for 10 tours. That's $0.50 per tour.

These have to be virtual tours, or VR tours. Or maybe the real first tired of getting stood up, or tired of people trying to see every property that exists without ever buying anything.

There's something strange with that.

Edit: someone linked the actual site theyre self tours, they're using the payment to collect data on the prospective tenants. Forcing you to pay with a non-gift card credit card means they get enough information to do a Nexus lookup on you.

we're not missing anything. renters don't pay for tours of units. that's the landlords problem. this is just all kinds of fucked up.
- They're self tours. They're forcing you to pay a pittance with a identifiable credit card (not a gift card) which gives them your billing address The name associated with your bank account and with a quick joint through Nexus you're approximate credit score and amount of money you make.
  At 50 cents a tour nobody's making any money off of it they're not even making enough money to pay for the internet connected lock they put on the door
The price at all is ridiculous. Touring a rental is a sales action. Yes you have to pay for someone to administer a tour, but that's a cost of doing business. It's also weird because you generally don't pay to tour homes for purchase.
- This is exactly it. It's always been a risk of being an estate agent/real estate agent. You take on the up-front cost on the basis you will make it back overall in commission in the long term.
  12 or so years ago, we were looking at rental properties. And not only was there none of this nonsense. They were finding extra properties to look at, in addition to the one(s) we asked for. They wanted to sell and understood they need to put in the time up-front to get that.
  But, if you can get the seller AND the buyer to pay you for your services? Damn, is that a win for them?
Or maybe the real first tired of getting stood up, or tired of people trying to see every property that exists without ever buying anything.
Those sound like "cost of doing business" as a landlord/management agent.
You sure? Cause nothing about what you're talking about is critical. Part of being a renter is the cost associated with showing units and convincing people to buy. You're lucky enough to have the capital to own rental property that's essentially passive income. If you don't want to put in the effort to show a unit to a potential tenant, then sell the real estate and fuck off with your money.
"Oh, you're interested in a desktop PC? It cost us money to power it on and show how well it runs while playing games or using it as a workstation. So to cover that cost we're going to have to charge you $5 to mess around with a display model."
"Test drive a used car on our lot? You're using 5 minutes of fuel and wearing the tires so $5 please."
"Welcome to your local shopping mall. It costs us money to keep the place cool in the summer and we're tired of people coming in and not buying something so to make sure we recapture that cost, we're charging $5 at the door."
FOOH
- Yeah, gone forbid they ask you for a way that ends up giving them your legal name and your home address and a likelihood of your credit rating No one would ever want that for a rental system. /s
  FOOH Right back at you.
You're missing the point, which is that estate agents already get paid by the landlord for this. Charging renters is just extra money for doing what they already did.
And in sane places it doesn't happen, and is often illegal.
It's real.
https://futurism.com/rently-apartment-tours
- I take issue with the phrase "landlords don't need to lift a single finger"
  I'm in the process of selling my house (in the UK) right now so I can move to somewhere cheaper. We have people coming round to view it on maybe a twice- or thrice-weekly basis. I don't even know their names. The estate agent (American: "realtor") handles all of that. I just get a phone call telling me they've got someone who wants to come and view at X date and time, all I have to do is say yes or no then arrange to not be home. It's all included in the frankly breathtaking sum I'm paying the estate agent.
  I can't imagine rental properties are different in any meaningful way.
Low?! The price should be zero.
If you're trying to sell a product, the last thing you want to do is create a barrier between potential customers and the sales pitch. Most people are going to look at the free homes first, and probably move into one of those before they pay a fee to see something they might not even want.
The only way this fee helps the company is if they have a monopoly on the area and people have no other choice than to pay to play.
If you have an agent that drives to the rental property, talks to you let you in walks around with you for 15 minutes maybe
Half the time they just send you a (usually wrong) door code or tell you to knock on the door and ask the existing tenants.
But also, the onus to pay a broker should NEVER be on the renter. That's a transaction between the broker and the landlord. If a landlord can't afford a broker they can show the place themselves. If a renter can't afford a broker they're locked out of the transaction altogether.
there's probably a commission system built-in to pay the value of a month's rent or something to the 'agent' when you sign a lease. which means, of course, they're financially motivated to steer you to better paying properties (for them), not better units or locations for you.
- One month rent was the going rate for a real estate agent to fill a rental for you in my area 6 months ago. Paid by the landlord/property owner