> Yes! We will never give away any of your information.
For starters, they're leaking this information to Google.
After that, they're presumably subject to subpoenas. And they or an acquirer altering the agreement. And there's interpretations of "give away". And the inevitable data breaches.
I see no identification of who runs it, which doesn't seem consistent with their stated philosophy of "transparency and accountability", and might affect users' ability to hold them to their privacy assurances.
How anonymous can it be? Sure, if you were dealing with a city-wide management company they can keep it somewhat anonymous but saying "John Smith, landlord at 123 Fake St" with the review on a set date is a pretty good indication of who left the review. Even for management companies it would not take a lot of investigation to find the reviewer.
In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord. Maybe not for things that reach criminal levels of malfeasance but for your average renter with a crappy landlord there is zero leverage, it is particularly bad now because housing is so incredibly broken at the moment.
For a long time, you have needed references from prior landlords to rent another place.
This was especially challenging for mediocre landlords. Where there was nothing worth a court date but they may have ignored real problems and garnished the deposit with no reason.
Rental management companies are practically incentivized to deliver the worst service for the highest price.
It’s like the taxi industry before ratings from Uber and Lyft came to provide some recourse for riders.
Ridesharing’s present outcome isn’t to strive for but neither is the taxi industry of yore.
Most folks who talk up the benefits of renting haven’t done it in a very long time.
Landlords have a lot of power, even in Scandinavia where we highly regulate the renter-landlord “relationship”.
One example of how the regulation isn’t really working as well as intended is in average renting prices. Which despite there being 10.000 empty apartments in my city isn’t coming down. (10.000 is a lot in Denmark). The sister company of my place of work is a landlord, and part of the reason they don’t lower rental prices is because it’s hard to increase it later. So for a period of years it’s better for them to “bet” on the market changing enough to solve our empty apartment challenge. It looked bleak for a couple of years, but thanks to things turning around the strategy has worked out.
You can’t protect the rental market from this sort of thing unless you start limiting how many houses private equity are allowed to build and own. Which isn’t something cities are really interested in currently. It used to be such that co-ownership rental-groups or whatever you call “beboerforeninger” in English, if there is even an English term for it. But they are basically non-profit landlords which are owned collectively by every renter. Anyway it used to be that these organisations could compete with private landlords because private landlords were smaller. They have no chance of competing with the kind of deals we can cut a city now, or the speed at which we can buyout and replace old buildings. Simply because we, and companies like us, represent a literal fuckton of money. This is made worse by international investors, but it’s not exclusively caused by them. Our sister company has 0 foreign capital, and we’re still capable of competing with international capital on an equal level. Leaving almost no room for the non-profit organisations and absolutely no room for small investors on any serious level.
I don’t know about the US, but here in Denmark there is almost zero chance of it changing. There just won’t be enough political interest in it. In fact there is a huge political interest against it. Both from the cities themselves, but also for basically every home owner in our country. Because our high rental prices keep the housing market high as well, as people give up a lot sooner than we do. As seen with how the housing market is now again increasing here in Denmark after a period of almost dying. It’s not just because no cheap rentals became available, but it’s part of it.
> In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord. Maybe not for things that reach criminal levels of malfeasance but for your average renter with a crappy landlord there is zero leverage, it is particularly bad now because housing is so incredibly broken at the moment.
In the USA renting is largely a state law matter. Some states are very landlord friendly, but others, such as California, are considerably more tenant friendly. For example late fees are illegal in California and you can basically get a pro se judgment easy peasy if a landlord even attempts to get you to sign a lease with a late fee clause, let alone collect one. You can also withhold rent to pay for services the landlord should have provided, and so on. Anyhow I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but if you're in California learn your rights.
> In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord.
Very much this. The current outcome of any tenant complaint is a private warning not to make a fuss, with an auto-served eviction notice if the tenant makes a fuss anyway.
This situation can only be improved by legislating away at-will evictions (no, less demand would not help fix this, see pandemic). No chance of that in most of the U.S., though.
Uber/Lyft improved upon taxis because there were a lot of people who wanted to supply the service, but it was illegal for them to do so until Uber/Lyft punched a hole on the legal system. The rental market does not have this problem, in some sense the opposite.
Well from the perspective of a residential landlord all the laws are stacked against us, to the point where I can't risk renting to a very large segment of the population that (especially now) needs rental units desperately. So we shift investment from residential to commercial, or only have very high-priced units for high-income families. The narative is always faceless corporations and rich fat-cats, but that's not always true.
This is extremely true. I know a family who recently got out of a terrible situation where their landlord
- Regularly stole food from their kitchen
- Turned off their hot water for several weeks
- Verbally harassed their elementary school aged daughter
All of these things are illegal but in the city where they lived there isn't much practical recourse for a poor family. The only option the city lists on their website is to hire a lawyer and take the landlord to court. There's supposed to be a fine for every day the hot water is off, but guess who you can call to enforce that? Nobody. This is true of many laws that supposedly protect ordinary people (e.g. labor laws). Once you go to avail yourself of the protection you find there's actually no functioning mechanism and often that's by design.
landlords are much worse in the uk, since they're pretty much the politicians or people setting policy. i'm not making this up, my landlord is a tory politician and him and his friends own a bunch of property. I don't think party affiliatin matters - but point stands.
no incentive to improve housing at all.
whereas in the U.S, if you stay at a corporate owned apartment -- you're guaranteed things will be functional, repairs done on time etc. In, the U.K the repairs are done wheneveer the landlord feels like it. In london, you see some apartments get on the market without any repairs done to them at all
> In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord.
This is a wild generalization because every state has different rules and cities have their own different rules as well.
There are indeed places in the US where the landlord has all the power and the renter has zero rights and it can get ugly.
There are also places in the US where renters hold so much power that they can get away with everything and the hands of the landlord are tied and it can get ugly.
The best places are those where there is a balance, where the laws acknowledge that both the landlord and the renter need to act reasonably and not try to screw over the other party.
I’ve been in both sides of the relationship, and I want to start with my observation that bad landlords and bad tenants and rare. Most people aren’t predators, aren’t retaliatory, and generally act in reasonable ways. Some don’t, and the best we can do is not let them spoil it for the rest of us.
As a renter, I tried to leave units at least as good as I found them, and as a landlord I find most people do the same. Once out of a dozen places I lived, a landlord acted unscrupulously. And, as a landlord, I’ve had one renter trash a property. That seems like an expected amount of hassle to me. But the risk is very much asymmetric — I lost a week of pay to the landlord, but repairing the damage by the tenant cost me a year of rent.
In the US I don’t have a right to shelter, and while that may be awful in some respects it works for the most part. Hundreds of millions of people get shelter. But to be honest, I’m on the edge of getting out of being a residential landlord because of the increased regulation. While I agree with the ethos, the reality is that it increases my chance of being damaged financially regardless of my ethics/behavior.
Not sure what my real point is other than “don’t be awful”.
On a different note, I find the hypocrisy from some folks in this topic frustrating. They advance exploitative approaches to commercializing SaaS while decrying landlords doing the same. I don’t see a difference. We literally use the term “multi tenant”.
The problem with the landlord tenant power dynamic is that an unscrupulous party on either side can easily do great damage to the other.
Look at eviction laws in New York and California. Look at the recent headlines about squatting.
The landlord is actually the party with the greater financial risk by far, but the tenant has the emotional and social vulnerability of having no control over their home.
>In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord. Maybe not for things that reach criminal levels of malfeasance but for your average renter with a crappy landlord there is zero leverage, it is particularly bad now because housing is so incredibly broken at the moment.
In California, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the tenant.
E.g. for many business entities they demand requesting permission before linking to them:
> Please include your name, your organization name, (...) and a list of the URLs on our site to which you would like to link. Wait 2-3 weeks for a response.
And they don’t offer that themselves:
> We will consider requests to remove links, but we are not obligated to or so or to respond to you directly.
Is there a technical or product novelty here? Some other curious context I'm missing? It looks just like any other landlord/renter review site with the same challenges of privacy, defamation, discoverability, etc...
It's almost unbelievable that something like this doesn't already exist. People will read reviews of some 10 credit piece of shit from Amazon but not a person who has the power to ruin the next year or more of their lives.
I had a bad experience with a landlord recently. The washing machine broke and they just wouldn't replace it. They didn't refuse, the washing machine was simply "on order" for 6 months. I tried to have a conversation with the letting agent, human to human. I asked what they would do in my situation. They said they didn't know but whatever I do, don't stop paying rent because I'll get a bad reference.
I realised two things: a) there is a naughty list for tenants but not for landlords and b) I'm nothing but a source of money in their eyes. A human to human conversation was never going to happen.
The agents don't care about the tenants because why would they? It's lose/lose for a tenant. You either cough up or go on the naughty list. The landlord has all the power. They are literally called landlords! And we just accept this power imbalance as if it's normal!
On another note I find the trend of naming things with feminine sounding names interesting. Of course there is no "Michelle" really.
Unless the landlord has 100s or 1000s of tenants I don't think people can stay anonymous usually people rent for multiple years the churn is not high enough for deducing who wrote the review
What happens when renters go and shame landlords for getting kicked out for not paying rent and such? Most people leave reviews when they are angry, not when they are satisfied.
Landlords aren't usually liked, accepted perhaps but not liked. Sometimes they have to make tough decisions and this can unfortunately make people angry.
I get it for a hotel, but a landlord isn't getting paid to work with customer service, they simply rent it the place. So, if they can't have the ability to respond about the person slamming them won't that cause issues? It has to be a two-way street, otherwise it will push prices up so they can deal with the additional admin and work around making everyone happy.
They do deserve their privacy as well, most landlords are not a company so publicly slamming their name seems like something that they shouldn't have to deal with. They deserve anonymity. If this happens to a landlord once, they may not rent again.
Now, I'm not against it for situations that are absolutely horrendous but like another commenter pointed out, if they are really that bad you will notice it when you meet them the first time and they show you the property.
But rating people, i.e. landlords, is not the same as rating a company.
For example, if I really like an apartment and want to stay longer in it, I might be inclined to write a fake review about how about the apartment or my landlord is to steer competition away.
If a person enters a relationship for housing with somebody (landlord) who is in every way incentivized to not support your thriving with that housing, then foundationally you’re in a situation where a core function of life (shelter) cannot be considered stable.
If you were to use Paul Graham’s “default alive or default dead” metaphor for homelessness, that means every single person who isn’t a landlord is “default homeless”
In this case, every persons stability lives at the whim of a landlord - and to be clear, you can put all of the eviction laws in place that you want, but if a landlord does not want you on the property even if they cant immediately evict you without recourse (a matter of money and political power at that point) they can and will make your life worse than if you weren’t even in that property.
The fact that it’s illegal to be alive without paying somebody else to live is insanity
What is the incentive for someone to leave a review? Given that each person only has a handful of places they can review, you won't have serial reviewers like on other review sites.
I don’t know about where you live or what it’s like in the states where this site is presumably targeted but in Australia people would have ample opportunity to be serial reviewers.
The incentive is having some power over the landlord: treat me badly, you get a bad review. No idea why someone would write a good review, though. But bad reviews are more important. Landlords already have the benefit of the doubt.
The core issue with this is that I don’t think people have free market choice of rental accommodation? That’s the entire reason for stratospheric rent increases: property is increasingly mass owned by corporations, that collude on pricing. As a result fewer people can buy homes, and ever more end up being owned by rental corporations.
At no point does “what is management like?” come into the equation.
I've had a couple of spectacularly underwhelming (well, flat out hostile) apartment complexes throughout my career as a renter, but I've always hesitated to leave negative Yelp reviews about the building fearing either retribution or not being able to get referrals in the future in case I need it for my next landlord.
Wish I could somehow hold these companies accountable though, other renters would probably benefit from it.
Sure, I could move, but the process of finding a new place and moving all of your belongings and address (at least in a desirable US city) is such a hassle that often as renters we'll just stay put and suck it up.
[+] [-] neilv|1 year ago|reply
> Yes! We will never give away any of your information.
For starters, they're leaking this information to Google.
After that, they're presumably subject to subpoenas. And they or an acquirer altering the agreement. And there's interpretations of "give away". And the inevitable data breaches.
I see no identification of who runs it, which doesn't seem consistent with their stated philosophy of "transparency and accountability", and might affect users' ability to hold them to their privacy assurances.
[+] [-] ZhadruOmjar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thih9|1 year ago|reply
How are they leaking the information to google? Our, if you’re unwilling to share the details, how much is revealed?
[+] [-] RobotToaster|1 year ago|reply
Which implies they store the information. If it was anonymous they wouldn't store identifying information.
[+] [-] 20240519|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|1 year ago|reply
Sounds like it’s anonymous to me :)
That’s how governments like to run things: https://community.qbix.com/t/transparency-in-government/234
[+] [-] throwaway290|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] surfingdino|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bredren|1 year ago|reply
For a long time, you have needed references from prior landlords to rent another place.
This was especially challenging for mediocre landlords. Where there was nothing worth a court date but they may have ignored real problems and garnished the deposit with no reason.
Rental management companies are practically incentivized to deliver the worst service for the highest price.
It’s like the taxi industry before ratings from Uber and Lyft came to provide some recourse for riders.
Ridesharing’s present outcome isn’t to strive for but neither is the taxi industry of yore.
Most folks who talk up the benefits of renting haven’t done it in a very long time.
[+] [-] devjab|1 year ago|reply
One example of how the regulation isn’t really working as well as intended is in average renting prices. Which despite there being 10.000 empty apartments in my city isn’t coming down. (10.000 is a lot in Denmark). The sister company of my place of work is a landlord, and part of the reason they don’t lower rental prices is because it’s hard to increase it later. So for a period of years it’s better for them to “bet” on the market changing enough to solve our empty apartment challenge. It looked bleak for a couple of years, but thanks to things turning around the strategy has worked out.
You can’t protect the rental market from this sort of thing unless you start limiting how many houses private equity are allowed to build and own. Which isn’t something cities are really interested in currently. It used to be such that co-ownership rental-groups or whatever you call “beboerforeninger” in English, if there is even an English term for it. But they are basically non-profit landlords which are owned collectively by every renter. Anyway it used to be that these organisations could compete with private landlords because private landlords were smaller. They have no chance of competing with the kind of deals we can cut a city now, or the speed at which we can buyout and replace old buildings. Simply because we, and companies like us, represent a literal fuckton of money. This is made worse by international investors, but it’s not exclusively caused by them. Our sister company has 0 foreign capital, and we’re still capable of competing with international capital on an equal level. Leaving almost no room for the non-profit organisations and absolutely no room for small investors on any serious level.
I don’t know about the US, but here in Denmark there is almost zero chance of it changing. There just won’t be enough political interest in it. In fact there is a huge political interest against it. Both from the cities themselves, but also for basically every home owner in our country. Because our high rental prices keep the housing market high as well, as people give up a lot sooner than we do. As seen with how the housing market is now again increasing here in Denmark after a period of almost dying. It’s not just because no cheap rentals became available, but it’s part of it.
[+] [-] User23|1 year ago|reply
In the USA renting is largely a state law matter. Some states are very landlord friendly, but others, such as California, are considerably more tenant friendly. For example late fees are illegal in California and you can basically get a pro se judgment easy peasy if a landlord even attempts to get you to sign a lease with a late fee clause, let alone collect one. You can also withhold rent to pay for services the landlord should have provided, and so on. Anyhow I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but if you're in California learn your rights.
[+] [-] saithound|1 year ago|reply
Very much this. The current outcome of any tenant complaint is a private warning not to make a fuss, with an auto-served eviction notice if the tenant makes a fuss anyway.
This situation can only be improved by legislating away at-will evictions (no, less demand would not help fix this, see pandemic). No chance of that in most of the U.S., though.
Uber/Lyft improved upon taxis because there were a lot of people who wanted to supply the service, but it was illegal for them to do so until Uber/Lyft punched a hole on the legal system. The rental market does not have this problem, in some sense the opposite.
[+] [-] skeeter2020|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] chii|1 year ago|reply
it's much better than the taxi of yore. It's not the perfect outcome, but it's an improvement nevertheless.
[+] [-] tdeck|1 year ago|reply
- Regularly stole food from their kitchen
- Turned off their hot water for several weeks
- Verbally harassed their elementary school aged daughter
All of these things are illegal but in the city where they lived there isn't much practical recourse for a poor family. The only option the city lists on their website is to hire a lawyer and take the landlord to court. There's supposed to be a fine for every day the hot water is off, but guess who you can call to enforce that? Nobody. This is true of many laws that supposedly protect ordinary people (e.g. labor laws). Once you go to avail yourself of the protection you find there's actually no functioning mechanism and often that's by design.
[+] [-] dzonga|1 year ago|reply
landlords are much worse in the uk, since they're pretty much the politicians or people setting policy. i'm not making this up, my landlord is a tory politician and him and his friends own a bunch of property. I don't think party affiliatin matters - but point stands.
no incentive to improve housing at all.
whereas in the U.S, if you stay at a corporate owned apartment -- you're guaranteed things will be functional, repairs done on time etc. In, the U.K the repairs are done wheneveer the landlord feels like it. In london, you see some apartments get on the market without any repairs done to them at all
[+] [-] jjav|1 year ago|reply
This is a wild generalization because every state has different rules and cities have their own different rules as well.
There are indeed places in the US where the landlord has all the power and the renter has zero rights and it can get ugly.
There are also places in the US where renters hold so much power that they can get away with everything and the hands of the landlord are tied and it can get ugly.
The best places are those where there is a balance, where the laws acknowledge that both the landlord and the renter need to act reasonably and not try to screw over the other party.
[+] [-] mlhpdx|1 year ago|reply
As a renter, I tried to leave units at least as good as I found them, and as a landlord I find most people do the same. Once out of a dozen places I lived, a landlord acted unscrupulously. And, as a landlord, I’ve had one renter trash a property. That seems like an expected amount of hassle to me. But the risk is very much asymmetric — I lost a week of pay to the landlord, but repairing the damage by the tenant cost me a year of rent.
In the US I don’t have a right to shelter, and while that may be awful in some respects it works for the most part. Hundreds of millions of people get shelter. But to be honest, I’m on the edge of getting out of being a residential landlord because of the increased regulation. While I agree with the ethos, the reality is that it increases my chance of being damaged financially regardless of my ethics/behavior.
Not sure what my real point is other than “don’t be awful”.
On a different note, I find the hypocrisy from some folks in this topic frustrating. They advance exploitative approaches to commercializing SaaS while decrying landlords doing the same. I don’t see a difference. We literally use the term “multi tenant”.
[+] [-] noduerme|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] whiddershins|1 year ago|reply
Look at eviction laws in New York and California. Look at the recent headlines about squatting.
The landlord is actually the party with the greater financial risk by far, but the tenant has the emotional and social vulnerability of having no control over their home.
[+] [-] goodpoint|1 year ago|reply
It's not just "broken". It's designed that way to benefit large financial groups.
[+] [-] aurareturn|1 year ago|reply
In California, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the tenant.
[+] [-] thih9|1 year ago|reply
E.g. for many business entities they demand requesting permission before linking to them:
> Please include your name, your organization name, (...) and a list of the URLs on our site to which you would like to link. Wait 2-3 weeks for a response.
And they don’t offer that themselves:
> We will consider requests to remove links, but we are not obligated to or so or to respond to you directly.
[1]: https://www.michelleslist.com/terms-of-service
[+] [-] sjtrny|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lxe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] globular-toast|1 year ago|reply
I had a bad experience with a landlord recently. The washing machine broke and they just wouldn't replace it. They didn't refuse, the washing machine was simply "on order" for 6 months. I tried to have a conversation with the letting agent, human to human. I asked what they would do in my situation. They said they didn't know but whatever I do, don't stop paying rent because I'll get a bad reference.
I realised two things: a) there is a naughty list for tenants but not for landlords and b) I'm nothing but a source of money in their eyes. A human to human conversation was never going to happen.
The agents don't care about the tenants because why would they? It's lose/lose for a tenant. You either cough up or go on the naughty list. The landlord has all the power. They are literally called landlords! And we just accept this power imbalance as if it's normal!
On another note I find the trend of naming things with feminine sounding names interesting. Of course there is no "Michelle" really.
[+] [-] sgerenser|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] xbmcuser|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] johhns4|1 year ago|reply
Landlords aren't usually liked, accepted perhaps but not liked. Sometimes they have to make tough decisions and this can unfortunately make people angry.
I get it for a hotel, but a landlord isn't getting paid to work with customer service, they simply rent it the place. So, if they can't have the ability to respond about the person slamming them won't that cause issues? It has to be a two-way street, otherwise it will push prices up so they can deal with the additional admin and work around making everyone happy.
They do deserve their privacy as well, most landlords are not a company so publicly slamming their name seems like something that they shouldn't have to deal with. They deserve anonymity. If this happens to a landlord once, they may not rent again.
Now, I'm not against it for situations that are absolutely horrendous but like another commenter pointed out, if they are really that bad you will notice it when you meet them the first time and they show you the property.
But rating people, i.e. landlords, is not the same as rating a company.
[+] [-] bilsbie|1 year ago|reply
There’s always one thing wrong with every house and half the time it’s a deal breaker.
You’d save so much time house shopping if you knew what the deal breaker was ahead of time.
[+] [-] aurareturn|1 year ago|reply
For example, if I really like an apartment and want to stay longer in it, I might be inclined to write a fake review about how about the apartment or my landlord is to steer competition away.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|1 year ago|reply
If you were to use Paul Graham’s “default alive or default dead” metaphor for homelessness, that means every single person who isn’t a landlord is “default homeless”
In this case, every persons stability lives at the whim of a landlord - and to be clear, you can put all of the eviction laws in place that you want, but if a landlord does not want you on the property even if they cant immediately evict you without recourse (a matter of money and political power at that point) they can and will make your life worse than if you weren’t even in that property.
The fact that it’s illegal to be alive without paying somebody else to live is insanity
[+] [-] robertclaus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dools|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] globular-toast|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] olliej|1 year ago|reply
At no point does “what is management like?” come into the equation.
[+] [-] vinnyglennon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] anonu|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thih9|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 8f2ab37a-ed6c|1 year ago|reply
Wish I could somehow hold these companies accountable though, other renters would probably benefit from it.
Sure, I could move, but the process of finding a new place and moving all of your belongings and address (at least in a desirable US city) is such a hassle that often as renters we'll just stay put and suck it up.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] iamacyborg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bag_boy|1 year ago|reply