Freakonomics: How to Avoid a Bad Apartment in New York City | Hacker News Reader

Freakonomics: How to Avoid a Bad Apartment in New York City

freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com

54 pointscwan40 comments

Here's an approach I've always wanted to try, but never had the opportunity:

If the apartment is currently occupied, write a brief informal note telling the tenant you're considering their apartment and would they send you a brief honest review of how their time there has been. Include a SASE & an email address. Address it by hand to Current Resident, and drop it in a mailbox. You could even include a $5 gift card to starbucks or something. Seems you would have a pretty good chance at a thoughtful response & it's a lot less invasive than just going up and knocking on their door.

That's a great idea and creates a win-win situation!

Sadly, NYC apartment hunting is a little different. Landlords and apartments have a huge incentive to use their limited advertising bandwidth on already vacant apartments.

Vacant apartments cause landlords to bleed more money than almost-vacant apartments, and brokers are all about selling quickly in volume, which is easier to do when the aparmtent is vacant (easy to photograph, easy to show)

That's very interesting. So really the trick is to somehow catch people to write a review before they leave. Of course the problem is to post it publicly would expose their identity (since they have a unique address) and possibly open them up to retribution from the landlord. So a kind of 'Yelp for Apartments' really doesn't seem like it would work.

One possible solution is to take advantage of the likelihood the last tenant still has forwarding setup with the USPS. If you could snoop out their last name, you could send the note addressed to them at the apartment and it would likely be forwarded to them where ever they went.

When we were looking for a house, we asked the people who would be living above us. We ended up living somewhere else (due to issues that we were previously aware of), but they were very friendly and informative.

But your idea is indeed less invasive.

The problem with this, at least in NYC, is that apartments go so quickly. There's no way a good apartment will be available long enough for this to get back to you.

You could leave an e-mail address, as well.

I realize people are more motivated to complain than praise, but with the universe of apartments being so vast, they need a LOT of datapoints before the complement of a black list (all apartments with no complaints) becomes close to a decent whitelist (apartments that are likely to be good).

Imagine a site called One-Star-Yelp.com, a subset of Yelp that only has reviews which scored 1-star ratings. The only reason you would visit is for entertainment value, not to look for tips on where you will dine tonight.

Maybe the best solution is to log all 311 calls (NYC's complaint hotline), and then let entrepreneurs freely mine the data to be put to good use.

[EDIT: I see now the massive value of steering people to non-crappy, but I think a blacklist would be far too hard to construct to be valuable vs. a whitelist]

The effective scale is important, here. One star yelp wouldn't do much for me because the long term effect of a bad meal never extends past about 36 hours. A bad lease can cause turmoil for years.

There's also a slight difference in the services. It's quite easy to find out the positives about living in a certain place (location, size, etc) and if there's any information imbalance about something good the landlord/broker will do their best to rectify it.

In New York most people on a realistic budget have no choice but to settle for a non-crappy apartment. Often times what looks like a deal, or even just affordable, is priced that way for a reason: it has bedbugs, it's right above a bar, it's right below the J train, someone just was murdered in it, etc. It's actually pretty useful to have a registry of what truly sucks so you don't waste your time.

> someone just was murdered in it

I never understood why this icked someone out (unless they were murdered by a random drive-by - that indicates a local crime problem).

I'd LOVE to find a place that wasn't renting because someone died in it - I wouldn't care in the least, and the rent would be low.

Same. Properly cleaned, what do I care. One day, I am going to die in my apartment, too.

GoodNYCApartments.com is available, if anyone wants to start the Five-Star-Yelp equivalent.

Could be worth snapping up... if this badnycapartments.com takes off then the "good" equivalent will immediately become worth serious money.

As somebody who has been a renter and a landlord, I feel like there will be a strong incentive for renters to either exaggerate an apartments problems, or outright lie. If your landlord is evicting you due to noise, late rent, etc., many people's natural instinct is to "get back at him" and this provides a zero risk way to do that.

Even assuming that many tenants will lie, you can ask the landlord or the broker. Now it gives them a harder choice: instead of not telling you they have to lie. Quite an improvement, IMHO.

Also, many things can be checked even without asking if you know what to look for.

I'm floored that Steve doesn't realize people love to complain, and that giving people an outlet to moan about their bad apartment is all the incentive they need.

Problem is that this skews the data, since people who post are self-selected to be people with negative experiences. There're a bunch of apartment review sites out there already; I looked at a bunch when I moved out here. The reviews are almost uniformly negative, because the only people who contribute are the ones that like to complain.

If you want to remove the information asymmetry, you need a random sample of previous tenants. This is hard to get unless you force people to write reviews or provide some incentive that is stronger than their urge to complain.

Reviews for lots of online products have bimodal distributions: you get tons of 5-stars and tons of 1-stars.

But that's not the point with this site. As an apartment hunter (probably from another city or state), you have little information on structural problems with the apartment. How can you find out if your 1st-floor apartment floods or lacks concrete foundation? Your realtor or landlord probably won't tell you the truth.

So, instead, you can turn to former tenants. This site isn't a review data aggregator--it's a tool for reaching informational equilibrium.

>you get tons of 5-stars and tons of 1-stars.

This is entirely explained by game theory. If you think the final star rating for something should be something other than what the average currently is, you maximize your power over the rating by using only 1 or 5 star ratings.

That's assuming reviewers only derive utility from some product's star rating and not from voicing their opinion. If it were solely game theory, we'd see tons of 1- and 5-star reviews with only one or two lines of text (as this would maximize utility while minimizing the time cost of reviewing). For websites with more affluent user bases, (Yelp, Amazon's non-video game products), that's not the case: there are some epic screeds for and against restaurants and coffee tables.

To me, it looks like a self-selection issue: people only review a product if it either (a) changes their life positively, or (b) causes them trouble. If a product only impacts someone's life in a trivial way, well, why write a 3-star review for a trivially good product?

In all fairness, the site featured is BADnycapartments - so the sole purpose of the site is to catalog and displayed data skewed in the favor of negative experiences.

I do love how there are overwhelmingly negative reviews of apartment managers online. But then there are also equally ridiculous positive reviews of the apartment managers, obviously written by the managers themselves.

Agree with random samples. Also need larger samples. Or something like a carfax for apartments.

If you take some time to read a fair number of reviews of a fair number of apartments, you can get a good idea of how much people bitch about a normal apartment vs a shitty apartment.

Example: there's an apartment near where I live which looks like a great deal on paper, but on some internet review site there were lots of complaints about how there are hidden fees for things like parking, and how the apartments aren't insulated so you end up with a huge heating bill. I didn't see those complaints with other apartments, so I think they're legit.

Agreed, and I'll go a step further: people just want to voice their opinions. Just look at Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or your local paper's "letters to the editor" section.

As someone who's looking to move to New York in about a month, I'm hoping their site picks up pretty quick.

Also, hoping they expand into other areas; no reason to limit this to NYC. I've got a couple of places in Dallas I'd gladly register to bitch about.

That of course is the problem with the premise. People are motivated to complain more than they are to express that the apartment was adequate.

True but as ling as you read the reviews knowing that then You can use them to compare to one another. ie Your looking at two places, one has complaints about the shower taking too long to warm up while the other has complaints about the basement flooding once a month.

And in general, I'm more interested in the complaints anyway. "Great place to live, landlord quick to respond, quiet street" is a lot less useful to me than "TOILET SPEWS ROACHES EVERY TUESDAY AT 3PM".

I'm also looking to move to NYC in about a month. Have you spent much time exploring the neighborhoods? I'm heading out there in about two weeks to do so, but I've been looking at a lot of places on Craigslist and asking people for their opinions on different areas to get an idea of what I'm getting into. Happen to be looking at any specific area?

Not as much as I wanted. Last trip, on a fact-finding mission, we ended up spending a lot of time wandering around Manhattan, and doing some touristy stuff, and in general being exhausted.

We're going to live in Brooklyn for sure. My girlfriend likes Brighton Beach, and I'm from Russia, originally, so I wouldn't mind living there. We also heard great things about that hipster part of town whose name I forget.

We should probably combine forces somehow.

I'm also moving to NYC in about a month. My girlfriend and I went up a little bit ago to check out neighborhoods.

It really depends on what you are looking for. We stayed in Williamsburg for the duration of our trip (about 5 days) to get a feel for it, as lots of people recommended it. It turns out we didn't really like it (nothing bad per se, just not what we're looking for).

We settled on Lower East Side, as it best represents what we're looking for.

To handle the issue of apartment hunting while not living there, we're going to end up just using airbnb to find a monthly rental, move our stuff up and put it in storage (we're moving from DC), and hopefully will be able to find a place easier by being there.

Im moving to nyc in 2-3 weeks as well. Maybe we can join forces and push down the broker fees. 4 can be stronger than 1.

I've got a couple of places in Dallas I'd gladly register to bitch about.

I hope they eventually expand too, but from what I gather the problems in NYC are vastly magnified because of a) how tight the market is due to height control restrictions on housing and b) the sheer cost of housing. I'm living in Tucson, AZ, right now and paying about $550 for a pretty nice one bedroom that would probably cost $2K in Manhattan and 1,400 in Brooklyn. If this one doesn't work out, I break the lease for $1,100, and although it sucks, I can find another place of similar quality relatively easily and am out a lot of money but not a catastrophic amount.

If I do the same in New York, I'm out a TON of money and have to do a lot of shopping, at least from what I understand.

I wonder if they run into a legal issue at some point of time with people posting such information on the site.

Wasn't there a case of a tenant being sued for libel by the landlord for ranting on twitter or blog about something being wrong with the apartment?

Edit: Found the story. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/landlord-sue...

Yes,I was going to make this point - if you write a bad review and the owners decide to pursue legal action, there is clearly a trail back to you because the reviewer must be one of the previous tenants.

My metric for discovering if a place is bad on Craigslist is number of posts. If a place has been posted more than twice it's almost guaranteed to have something wrong with it.

Oh man. NYT exposure (for http://badnycapartments.com ) and their website can barely handle it and/or has no real content...

I've been in the market for an apartment in Mountain View (and recently leased one), and found that it is almost impossible to find an apartment building (run by management) that doesn't get horrible reviews on ApartmentRatings.com. Which is unfortunate because unless you really dive in, the tool becomes completely useless - - it can't be that every apartment is really that awful, and yet the only people who post reviews are those who are pissed and those who are shills (probably the management company themselves). I found internet reviews of apartment buildings completely useless in this regard.

Oh god they're using Joomla (sobi2)...the usability of the site is really bad. For example, I searched "291 macdougal street" and it returns all of the listings...

Do the Freakonomics people have any connection to the owners of badapartmentsnyc.com ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com