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Comment by jakevoytko | Hacker News Reader

It's possible to rent an apartment without paying a broker. It's more work, but it's worth the time.

Paying a broker costs roughly a month of rent, so even if the value of your time is $200/hour, you're coming out ahead by doing the work yourself. I've had luck with both pay-to-play aggregators like http://www.rdny.com, as well as blind Google searching. Friends of mine have also done free aggregators like streetyeasy, and one even just showed up to a building and asked about free listings.

This is useful if you want to rent an apartment, not a specific apartment. Many apartments only go through brokers. I don't think that's a good-enough argument to go with one.

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You can also avoid rental fees by moving into newer buildings that have in house rental offices. I've never actually had to pay a broker fee in the 10 years / 4 apartments I've had here.

Brokers are the worst. Their incentives are not aligned with yours on anything besides wanting to get it over with asap.

That is for sure -- I cant recall a single positive experience with a RE broker. I realize this is a city-specific example, but for the new yorkers - i was looking for an apartment in the upper west side (which is generally considered to end at 96th st, perhaps 100 or 110th.) The broker said sure, and started pitching me on something at 135th. If i was an out-of-towner, I would not have known better, and what does 1.5mi matter anyway? In town, this is like comparing night and day.

How do brokers have the gall to straight-faced sell people on this stuff?

I pray that technology can disrupt this market.

> Their incentives are not aligned with yours on anything besides wanting to get it over with asap.

To be fair, that's occasionally exactly what you want - if you've just moved into town for the first time, for instance, and want to mitigate uncertainty (and hotel expenses) ASAP.

I've worked for a no fee apartment rental company, RDNY.com. I can assure you that no fee apartments available through this company are priced exactly the same as apartments brokers take you to.

How can I be so sure of this?

Easy. RDNY.com has a "to the trade" division, Acmelistings.com which provides NYC real estate brokers and agents with rental apartment listings. About 2,500 agents and brokers use this service. They are aggregating listings from over 1,000 landlords and selling that info to agents to use in renting apartments to their own clients. The rental prices of apartments on RDNY.com are exactly the same, to the penny, as the information fed to brokers through Acmelistings.com.

So there is such a thing as a true no fee apartment. Saving the broker's fee represents a very substantial savings up front - when your expenses for rent and security deposit are highest.

After 21 years supplying no broker fee apartments to thousands of users, they must be doing something right.

I was able rent my apartment off of craigslist from a old school Brooklyn family. I think they did go through a broker but they also paid for the broker fees I believe. I didn't have to pay anything to a broker.

Is there some legal requirement in New York that rentals must go through a broker? I don't know any other city in the country that you probably will pay a broker fee to rent an apartment. It just seems like the real estate industry dipping their hands into the NYC rental market as a completely unnecessary middle man. I wonder if this is because of New York's history of being majority rentals which, until recently, was fairly unique in the US.

I'm not familiar but to hazard a guess, I know how hard finding an apartment in New York can be (a couple of friends living there presently). Outside of other notables (like SF), it doesn't seem as big an issue. In Austin the market is really hot right now, but finding an apartment is still very easy. We were using an agent (also house hunting) but she wasn't adding any value; that may not be the case somewhere like NY, especially if you're unfamiliar with the market there.

No, there is no legal requirement. Other big cities often have brokers. Boston, for example, has many brokers, despite being much smaller than NYC.

Brokers serve the owner, not the renter. While it may seem like the renter is paying the broker's fee, it's really the owner. Compare the rents of equivalent apartments, one with and one without a broker. You'll find that the one with a broker is "cheaper" by approximately the annualized broker's fee. [0]

[0] My own research, randomly sampling Craigslist postings in NYC.

These used to be popular in San Francisco even [1]

"Todd founded Rent Tech in 1995 using text pagers to alert clients of new listings. Clients would receive a pager after they signed up for the service, and when a new listing came on the market that fit into their specifications, Rent Tech would send them a page about it. Within two months, the two began to look at how to distribute rental listings on the web, which is where all the company's business now takes place. "

[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/1999/09/20/s...

You haven't accounted for the length of the lease in your analysis. A no-fee place is baking the fee into the rent. The longer you stay in a place the better off you are paying the fee and starting at a lower rent. This is especially true if you are right around the borderline for rent stabilized apartments (I believe $2,700 a month in 2016). You are far better off getting a rent stabilized apartment for $2,650 and paying a fee than getting a no-fee apartment at say $2,850.

In my experience (12 years, 6 apartments) no fee apartments are priced somewhat higher than comparable fee apartments. Of course there are exceptions, we all know the guy that lucked into a great deal, but that's a hard thing to make happen on demand.

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