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For example, one time a landlord didn't return the security deposit. I called him, messaged him, left notes in his mailbox. No reply. One month, two months went by. So, I looked up the relevant legal code, found the part that said "landlords have 30 days to return the security deposit with any deductions listed. Failure to do so results in the landlord owing the tenant double the original amount with no deductions." I printed that out, highlighted the relevant section, and mailed him a letter saying that he can return the original deposit amount to me immediately, or I will file at the local court and he'll owe me double. I got a check in the mail two days later.
It could well be that they themselves don't understand your rights. Sure, in the case of the security deposit, they should be smart enough to know what this is.
But many landlords are just normal people with other jobs, where being a landlord is not a job to them, but an opportunity to earn money by renting. While one should be able to expect them to know the relevant laws, I bet that most of them don't care to bother because of the time and effort it takes.
That's no excuse for not returning a tenant's security deposit though.
Squatters are my biggest fear. I feel it is a justified fear. I also am happy to offer anyone a lease that requests one. I don't want to mindlessly use one. Live and learn they say:)
https://www.mass.gov/guides/the-attorney-generals-guide-to-l...
This was the document I used to shape my thinking and since I have more than 5 units (8 units total) I'm inspected by my town officials every 2 years to assure the livability.
I see the whole relationship as reciprocal and hope to avoid evictions. I do no credit checks and I do my own internet research. I place a lot of value on the personal interactions and so far I have had good fortune.
Just to be sure. Is this a smart name for what others call a 'deposit'?
I looked this up and Massachusetts is actually extremely strange that they count "last months rent" separate from "security deposit." In my state any money required to be collected past the first month's rent is legally considered a security deposit and required to be treated as one and subject to legal limits on security deposits. Which makes sense.
It's logical not to bother with the requirements of an extra security deposit if you can go ahead and collect two months rent up front without calling the extra a deposit. In my state the standard is also to collect two months rent up front - because the standard security deposit is a month's rent.
A tenant who has $1,000 in upaid rent and $0 is damage is no different than a tenant who has $1,000 in damage and no unpaid rent. The security deposit can be used to cover either.
I will see how this works out.
...so ? They earn money for doing essentially nothing, the least they should do is to know the law.
But I just intended to point out that "they expect you, the tenant, to not understand your rights and the laws that enforce those rights" is not the only reason.
While I am no landlord, I have relatives who are and they don't care about the law. It's something you they will be made aware of when it arises and then dealt with accordingly.
Take the example of GP's post, he kindly did the research for his ex-landlord until he convinced him. His ex-landlord may now see himself confirmed in that his approach to not caring is the right one, until the ex-renter brings up a very valid point.
I HIGHLY doubt land-lord didn't knew the meaning of "security deposit" and didn't return it immediately "because he didn't knew the law", especially when he was clearly ignoring the former tenant. He most likely counted on people not bothering to get it back when being ignored
I would say the rewards extremely outweigh the risk.
Only risk really, if you're getting mortgage to get apartment to rent is that prices go up but you can then just increase the rent. Aside from "tenant completely trashed my house", the risks are nonexistent, it's one of safest ways to invest your money.
Sounds like you should try it out, then.
Similarly, value decline is another real risk. I have lost 200k in value on home I live in. If I needed to sell, I would be SOL, which is a low occurrence but serious risk.
Are you a landlord? If not, why not, if you are convinced the risks are nonexistent and it's one of safest ways to invest your money?
Reality is that while risk is moderately low (but far from nonexistent), returns are also very low, so being a landlord isn't a particularly good investment. You're much better off in the stock market, at least up to the point where you have so much money that you start needing to diversify.
Ah yes, the highly valuable-to-society job that is being a leech.
Not everyone should have to purchase a home to live.
A landlord does not "provide housing liquidity". Housing is not a good that I can live without. I'll die without a roof over my head. Profiting off of that is the behavior of a leech.
These silly things like "x is a human right" miss the point. At some point people have to take responsibility.
Me ? No. Us, as a society, where we decide to ? Abso-fucking-lutely.
>Why would we have any nice housing at all in that situation? Why would anyone build it?
Nothing prevents you from putting in more money to make yourself the fancy house you've dreamed of. You can decide to give 300k to your favorite fancy house builder to have a prettier house than the plebs living in state housing. The US has the ACA, yet as far as I know the US still has private, higher quality hospitals. Turns out, making something a right doesn't mean "everyone has to have access to the best in class", but "has to have access to something which guarantees livable conditions."
>These silly things like "x is a human right" miss the point. At some point people have to take responsibility.
These silly "people have to take responsibility" talking points mostly shows that you have no regard for human life and would rather perpetuate suffering than provide something as basic as housing to people. Then again, since almost 100% of your post history in the past three months is about "oh no being a landlord is hard", it seems that you actively benefit from misery.
Please go live in some government-run housing before demanding that the poor do so. And look up "luxury belief". :)
There's no dialogue to be had with someone willing to leave people to die in the streets because "hurr durr they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps". Debate happens with reasonable positions, not with the depths of human indecency and Ayn-Randish takes.
>Please go live in some government-run housing before demanding that the poor do so.
I have been poor. I did. As a child, I lived in HLMs, which have been in existence in my country since 1894. As a student, I lived in student housing, that has existence since 1955.
>And look up "luxury belief". :)
Believing that people deserve a roof over their head without paying half of their income to a leech that did nothing be born with money is not a luxury belief.
I could very easily say you lack "human decency" by forcing the poor to live in run-down government housing. And that argument is just as strong as the one you are promoting.
You need to recognize that you are putting in effort here to elevate your own status in some "in group", not actually trying to argue a position with data and facts. Armchair socialism is entertaining, usually promoted by wealthy kids who have very few problems of their own. Honestly, this is me trying to help you.
Please talk to somebody (a real person) who has built a business. Broaden your perspective.
- First you pretend I'm trying to force you to build houses, which I'm not, I'm telling you it's the state's job to provide housing should none be available at reasonable prices. If you built a fancy house, sure, rent it for higher costs, if you can find a renter. If you built a house that barely matches a government built one... match government built rents.
- Then you go on and pretend I'm trying to force the poor to live in government run units, which I'm not. Both because _many of them already do anyways_, and because I'm not saying to ban owning property. Merely that there should be a force preventing you from raising your rent for what happens to be a basic life necessity.
- Then you go on and pretend that it is a luxury belief to have my positions, when I have been in the exact situations that are a problem, and even as of today, despite my situation being much better, a bit over 50% of my salary goes either to my landlord or to electricity/heating my home. Paying my landlord's loan isn't exactly my goal in life, sorry.
- Then you go on and pretend that every government housing is run-down which... no ? I can't even find an answer to that because it's both not an argument _and_ a lie.
- Then you go on and pretend that I'm doing this to elevate my own status in some "in group", without even considering for a single second that the reality of things is that I actively care for people and would rather see them in (basic) housing than cutting off a meal a day to pay off a landlord, or being out in the streets.
> Please talk to somebody (a real person) who has built a business.
Cool! I do on the daily. Also, being a landlord is not a business. A business has the added benefit of producing value. A landlord merely hoards housing.
To finish up on that: "Your ideas are bad, proven time and time again that they don't work". Despite all the evil that stalinist policies and maoist policies have caused, their involvement in insuring that everyone has basic housing affordable and available to them meant amazing development from farmer focused countries to absolute powerhouses of manufacturing and knowledge. You can debate various 'communist' and 'socialist' policies all you want (not real communists state capitalism yadda yadda yadda), you can be very aware of the damage they caused, while still recognising that the one thing we're talking about is probably the one that actually fucking worked.
This is me trying to help you: every single one of your arguments has been projection of what _you_ would do if you were in a situation like that. It is not healthy, and I recommend you take a deep look within at your own morality.
Again, look up the term "luxury belief". It's not what you think it is.
Again, you clearly have never built anything or risked anything. Building and operating housing isn't some easy job that requires no risk, investment, or effort. To suggest such exposes how little you understand about businesses. Yet, you keep asserting that you know everything about what a business is. Odd. The massive profits being generated in the housing market are mostly owners of gentrified houses, not those evil developers. This takes 5 minutes of research to confirm. The rest are due to government policies that limit housing production. Again, do your research.
And... holding up Stalin as an example. I... just can't. You must be a parody account, right? Right? Please be so, because otherwise.... jesus christ.
Ending this one, as it's clear you have major gaps in business knowledge, basic economic theory... and Stalin? lol.
It's never been about that. Do you have a right to claim ownership of the land, that was created by God? Certainly neither you nor the people you inherited the land from or bought it from created it. It was there 1000 years ago, 100 000 years ago and 1 000 000 years ago. Yet you lay claim to it and demand that others pay you for using it.
That's what it is about.
The "ownership" of land is one of the most strong abstract belief among humans. If I tell hacker news that I should not have to pay taxes because I have the right to my own body and work, the people here will react like that is crazy. If I tell hacker news that I have the right to some land that I bought, the people here will heartily agree. Even though that land was not created by anybody and stolen several times during history.
We're in the situation right now when the majority of highly educated people and hard working people in the richest countries of the world has no chance of a future at all. Even something so primitive as Maoist revolution would give them a better shot at owning their own home than continuing to obey Western law and rules. How did things end like this?
When people say "housing is a human right", what they really mean is that they want to outlaw renting or even private home ownership. If the government moved every homeless person to Wyoming and gave them a home, that wouldn't be enough.
On the other, that'd probably make Wyoming a kickass place to live in.
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including foods, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
So, yes, they're both part of the same human rights. Note that the US has not ratified the UDHR, because... Well, it's the US.
If I have a right to an adequate standard of living then why should I work? Why should anyone (except those uncommon cases of people who actually enjoy their jobs). I have a right to all the stuff I need already. Now, who do I sue so that it's actually delivered? :)
So, why would you work? Aside from the fact that you can legitimately ask that question (productivity has increased a hundredfold in the past years, yet your salary has not. Clearly someone has pocketed that difference, and sadly we can't blame PiS for everything), the right to laziness being an actively debated subject in many circles, from economic to philosophical, note that it says "adequate". If you are content with a basic house, heating and food, sure, stay at home. If you intend to have things like a TV, a PC, books, vacations outside, a social life, you might want to work to pay for them. And with basic needs covered, you can actually work and do something you enjoy, instead of holding a miserable job because you have no choice but to.
>Now, who do I sue so that it's actually delivered? :)
I would recommend Ministerstwo Rodziny, Pracy i Polityki Społecznej as well as Parlament Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej. Good luck :)
What? For comparison, check out the standard of living of a 1900 century laborer. Or a 1500 peasant for that matter. We live like kings, compared to both of them.
Is your local supermarket also a leech because they'll sell you tomatoes and make a tiny profit off those? Shouldn't everyone have their own tomato farm instead?
You do need food a lot more than a roof to survive, after all.
And you can't fire them for doing a piss-poor job. Do you see why that's an issue?
I mean, you're literally advocating breaking the law in order for already wealthy people to earn more money.
> While one should be able to expect them to know the relevant laws
We're asked to take the strongest, most charitable interpretation of people's words, here.
It helps discussion.
They never stop to consider why their accountant keeps saying that they made $0 on the rental after depreciation ... must be a gift from the IRS!
Once you actually start trying to work it as a business you realize why most companies don't want to be in the business of renting single family homes, and stick to larger apartments.
Can you elaborate on this? Is it due to the larger numbers in multifamily
Genuinely, why would you hope/expect this? There is no incentive for most of them to do so in relatively inelastic markets such as housing.
(1) https://legalinfopei.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Renting-P...
(2) https://legalinfopei.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Renting-P...
There is also https://myoldapartment.org/ to see what the last tenant paid for their rent.
PEI seems to be a terrible place to live now. A small population with 50% of the population in one small area. Surge of newcomers. The scourge Airbnb STRs. Buildings going up daily but nowhere to live. Lots of slum landlords in slum buildings. Historical properties as apartment buildings but renovating has to be done historically accurately so no landlord does anything. Rent jumping by 10% or even 95% for one place (a rush beofre the new regs). Controls and new regulations only now implemented after the party in power dragged its feet.
It was so endemic in Chicago that it was standard practice to withhold last month’s rent and send the landlord a letter saying to take the security deposit and send you a bill for any repairs.
This is both against the lease and financially equivalent to what an honest landlord would do, except the burden to get paid is now on the landlord.
If they have kept your security deposit in a separate, interest bearing account as the law requires[0] there should be no problem in the transaction.
0. Hahahahaha there was exactly one landlord I had who actually did this (not in Chicago) and returned my full security deposit with interest.
In response landlords started to require non-refundable move-in fees in lieu of a security deposit. These can range between about 40-60% of a month's rent.
Oh I've had this happen to me from a "high income landlord" in San Francisco. Penny pincher lady living in a wealthy neighborhood, repairing herself the leaky roof of the SF building she owns with duct tape. Tried to keep my deposit until, like the comment you're replying to, I threatened to bring her to small claims court. I had the deposit in my mailbox the next day.
Young jedi. You mail this AFTER 30 days and get the money.
I got really lucky when the company I work for went public. Going from being nearly homeless as a child to being a well-compensated, and now wealthy, engineer really was motivating to give something back. Buying a few properties, renting them to lower income people, and really working with them when they're struggling might not be efficient/scalable with my little 7 figure windfall, but being able to make and see a direct impact really makes me quite happy.
Assuming you’re in the United States you would’ve been legally required to do this anyways.
The bar really is set on the floor.
He ended up somewhat deliberately staying after he got it out of them that they couldn't legally kick him out quickly, and he was trying to finish the purchase of a house at the time. But it seemed nuts that the landlord wouldn't be on the hook to provide him housing through the term of his lease without signing a new contract, or pay some large amount to break the contract that could have helped him cover a temporary mold-free option.
I hope you are dealing with less stress these days!
https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/California-Tenants-Guide...
Edit: I may be biased by living in California where there is apparently an implied warranty of habitability.
Simply relabeling or reclassifying the use of something and having agreement to those uses to pass liability of "misuse" when both parties are aware of actual and intended use goes a long way as well.
So many ways to pass liabilities and rights. The more society evolves, the less business is about providing or creating any sort of new value and more about optimizing away risk, costs, and any other potential liabilities while capturing as much actual value from the deal as possible in the process.
In theory, competition "regulates" this away. Some other landlord who provides a better value or service will clearly succeed over less value-add services to the consumer. In practice, the amount of choice, finite limitations of the best service providers, and often sheer complexity anymore of determining which amongst a set of options is actually best to the consumer seems to make this a non-starter. It allows a lot of abuse on the provider side to provide little-to-nothing and a continuous supply of new consumers to abuse should previous consumers become wiser and move on.
A landlord requiring renters insurance is illegal in the state of Oklahoma. It may be illegal in certain cities or towns as well. That said these are exceptions; this is broadly legal in the United States.
Assuming you live in the US, presumably you have ensured this practice is legal where you live.
[insert that adam smith quote here]
If there’s housing on that property, then that is something that was developed by the (current or previous) landlord for direct use by the tenant.
However, I’m unfamiliar with this work, so if a different conclusion is drawn elsewhere it would be interesting to read.
in effect, from smith's early draft of "the wealth of nations" (~1763): "In a Civilized Society the poor provide both for themselves and for the enormous luxury of their Superiors. [...] [T]hose who labour most get least."
which calls for that staggering question by spinoza: "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" deleuze & guattari following: "the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike"
Or some other Adam Smith quote?
I’m not saying you’re a bad person or a parasite, our landlady is lovely, but you have to be frank about the fact that someone else is working to enrich you to some level.
It would be nice if most of the renting was city-built and ran, with maybe buyout option if you live there for more than 5-10 or so years. THen city could easily control development, earn a bit of profit, and control the costs
You can make this argument about literally any purchased good. Everything bought by a worker is the same thing.
Expanding it out, I doubt it’s specific to humans, more like a property of known life forms.
It also doesn't help that exploitation is so poorly defined in these discussions that it could simply be substituted by "bad" or "something I don't like".
That said, I like it and would be interested in exploring it more. Exploitations is a transaction that increases leverage for future transactions is one that I havent heard before.
Im also curious about the inverse.e.g. what transactions reduce leverage?
I rented for almost ten years before buying my place.
The idea that my landlords were exploitative is complete bollocks. They provided me with a useful service.
I would never want to own an apartment or house in many of the areas that I rented. I didn't want to be there long term.
They presuppose that a personally held view, and oftentimes fringe one, is universally true and accepted and then make a bold unsupported criticism.
The charitable take is that people making them don't know that their view is controversial and think it is shared fact.
The less charitable take is that they are intentionally misleading, and doing it as a debate tactic to claim ground while avoiding discussing the real disagreement.
If you want to read further, look at history on colonization or apartheid which sets up these types of infrastructures or variations of it. History w/ Native Americans and what is going on in Israel are two recent/ongoing examples.
As for pre-capitalist history, you can look up "feudal land tenure", and before that is just different concepts of modes of land ownership across different geographies.
Being a landlord is an economic and political matter. To pretend the status quo of current hierarchies is fine to go with because it is the status quo belief is an awful way to live. Imagine if any radicals you admire in history behaved this way.
this is like if Marx's Manifesto was one page saying "everyone knows landords are bad"
On the topic of radicals, there are a lot that I don't admire and were atrocious. being against the status quo is not inherently virtuous. Imagine if X mass murderer just respected the status quo.
you can be for challenging hierarchies, the status quo, and a more dynamic socio-economic structure without making yourself slave to your neighbor. For that matter, you can do it without trying to enslave your neighbor
I know this is an old comment (for HN) but I will check back in 24 hours), or we can take it offsite. I always like a good chat. "S1artibarfastHN" at Gmail
I have informed opinions on property ownership and housing. I was a director for 100-person housing Co-op. I have been a renter. I am currently a landlord squeezing one tenant for market rate and providing another tenant housing and perpetuity for utility costs.
- I’m unhoused and identify as a lumpenprole. - Everything is a spectrum imo. - I was referring to radicals that aren’t radlib or fascist leaning.
I’d be interested in the email I send you and a response on which orthodox left-wing radicals were atrocious. Or if we agree that those specific radicals were not atrocious but many others are.
Awesome being director of a coop! Though IME most housing coops are exclusionary and not remotely democratic*
*I mean real democracy, not what neoliberal countries have.
Even if you sell low to low income people, they may be forced to sell at some point, to the highest bidder. I think OP is doing something really great: provide affordable housing on good terms.
My wife and I recently decided to buy after renting voluntarily for decades. We did all sorts of calculations. In some scenarios renting comes out on top. In others buying is more favourable.
Ultimately, our decision was based on the uncertainty created by the referencing system, on the recent spell of inflation and on changed personal circumstances rather than any long term financial advantage.
I don't like the sort of relationship that exists between landlords and tenants in the UK, but I'm not convinced that it is necessarily one of financial exploitation.
Small landlords have their money tied up in a badly diversified, inflexible asset that comes with unpredictable maintanance costs. I would never invest my own money like this.
If all goes well for the landlord, they make a profit. If not, only the bank makes a profit (unless interest rates rise too quickly and they have issued too many fixed rate mortgages).
If you buy your own home, the bank makes a profit and if you're lucky it turns out well for you financially. There's no guarantee that it will.
Yes, there are a small number of cases of a small landlord, with one property that they're having a hard time breaking even on, but those folks have a bad investment, and if they can't afford their investment, they should sell it to try to minimize their losses. Renters aren't on the hook to make them profitable.
By holding rental properties, they're inflating the value of homes for sale, making it harder for people to buy, and forcing people into renting.
We don't pity people who make stupid business decisions, so why should we pity landlords?
What I'm disputing is that it is necessarily exploitation and that owning your home is always the preferable choice.
I do understand where your sentiment comes from. The name "landlord" basically says it all. It hasn't always been a normal business and there is still quite a lot of that history left in the relationship between landlords and tenants (as well as in the grotesque distribution of land ownership in the UK).
About inflating the value of homes for sale I'm not sure. On one hand the available land is limited and so demand should inflate prices. I'm not even sure private ownership (or at least inheritance) of land should exist at all.
On the other hand, the price of homes as well as the level of rents is mostly determined by how many homes are built. More (private and public) capital flowing into building new homes makes home ownership and rents more affordable. Buy-to-let landlords provide some of that capital.
The other thing that could be done is changing planning rules and the taxation of land ownership so that more affordable homes get built.
I don't think home ownership deserves the status it has. Renting is fine. Affordability is far more important than who owns the place.
There's lots of systems in which renting can be done through cooperative systems that doesn't involve leeches.
Also, it shouldn't be impossible to debate systemic issues without comparing people to pests.
1. Buying in a bad neighborhood and things just get worse. 2. Tenant falling far behind for some reason then moving out. 3. Overpaying or over capitalizing. 4. While looking for a buyer or tenant, squatters or looters move in.
Please don't use terms like 'exploit' without specific details.
I prefer to be a tenant so that I have less worries, more freedom and more capital available for other investments.
Being a landlord should be risky. If it isn't, something is incredibly wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_General_Theory_of_Exploitati... by economist and political scientist John Roemer
It goes over exploitation. The wiki summarizes the thesis.
I can tell you've never done property management, because the most profitable areas are bad neighborhoods. In the US, section 8 housing is effectively guaranteed income, at favorable rates. The tenants don't really have much say in the conditions of the apartment, and all that's needed is to pass the housing authority inspection (which only cares about safety, not quality), so costs are generally low.
Being a slumlord is extremely profitable.
> Tenant falling far behind for some reason then moving out.
For the vast majority of the US, you can evict a person for nearly any reason with 30 days notice, and can evict someone for non-payment with 5 days notice. Holidays can extend that by a few days here and there, but for the most part, you can avoid tenants being months behind in rent, especially if the market is saturated.
Some landlords like to let their tenants fall behind because as long as the tenants eventually pay the rent, they get the late fees, which can increase their rents by 20% or so. Preying on the poor is also very profitable.
> Overpaying or over capitalizing.
You can do the same with any investment. Unlike other investments, though, you can write off most of your expenses, and you can carryover loss for essentially forever. Even bad real estate investments can be beneficial. There's a reason real estate investment is heavily favored by the rich.
Landlords aren't guaranteed to get rich, but it's extremely difficult to actually lose money as a landlord, unless you're a really shitty investor. Nearly everything you spend money on can be used for tax deductions (sometimes for years or forever after the loss), so even losses tend to be beneficial, when you're diversified properly. The law is way too favorable to property investment.
> While looking for a buyer or tenant, squatters or looters move in.
I did property management for a long time and can tell you this simply isn't a real problem. Squatters rights take a long time, and the police will forcibly remove them.
No one loots an empty apartment.
There are many scenarios where people would far rather rent than buy. E.g. you are trying to get to know a city to decide where to buy a house. You want to work in a city for a few years. You've just moved to a country and don't want to buy a property until you get a feel for where in the country you want to live, or maybe until you get permanent residence sorted out.
And that's not even covering cases where people don't have the money to buy yet. And no, it's not realistic to expect that people will all always have money to buy. Maybe they are young and just entered the workforce. Maybe they are an immigrant looking for a better life and came with little cash.
There has to be a rental market and thus there have to be landlords. Being a landlord does not make one "evil" or even taking advantage of people. It's needed and frankly shitty job. I'd personally never want to do it.
I'm being frank, your attitude is pretty toxic does not help the people who need the help the most.
Also, being a landlord isn't a job. Owning property isn't a job. Property management can be a job, but the typical landlord is barely lifting a finger to do much of that.
They made an investment and want you to maximize the returns. A very, very small percentage are active in their management, and those folks tend to be the worst form of slumlords, because they're so cheap they won't hire people to professionally manage the properties.
How are most of those things alternatives to housing ownership?
There's really only three possibilities. The occupant owns the place, or some other private party (individual or corporation) owns the place, or the government owns the place (public housing in its many variants).
Everything you list is one of these three (except for LVT which is an unrelated thing).
[0] Things were better during the 100% remote environment of the pandemic, but many employers are now doing RTO [1] In the recent past, I've had to replace my AC and my roof. The AC repair bill was equivalent to 6 months of mortgage payments and the roof was equivalent to a year's worth of mortgage payments.
Sure, you can take them to court, but most likely they'll let you know how they feel about that by sending some thugs.
Landlords can be the lowest scum of the earth. Many cooperations are great though, we never had any issues with them, they'd send someone quickly when asking for repairs, and were often very reasonable about things, etc.
This doesn't mean all landlords are criminals. But if you have a greed-driven sociopathic mindset all of the above are very attractive, and it's not hard to make them work together.
The same can be said for tenants.
Low interest rates and AirBnB has created a whole class of landlords that have no clue of their obligations to tenants. They think that owning the property is enough, and that they're doing you a favour.
Being a landlord is as old a business as there is. In any efficient market it is not easy or lucrative.
The UK does have a supposedly mandatory deposit protection scheme, but a lot of dodgy landlords aren't compliant with it, and the dispute process is a fucking nightmare.
You can claim up to three times the deposit if it isn't protected in 30 days.
The dispute process is pretty good I have found.
I mean if you were concerned about the hassle it seems you could have equally said, 45 days have passed, at this point you are legally obliged to give me 2x the deposit, citing the law as you did. Pay me 1.5x the deposit now or 2x when I file at the local court.
At least then in the future they may respond to the first message to future tenants.
I think there's also a cost-benefit evaluation when it comes to deciding where to make use of those laws. I've heard that there are tenant screening services that will report whether you have previously sued a landlord. Is it even worth it to sue if it's going to make it more difficult to find a better place later?
I also find these sites largely useless for research as only the people with extremely strong sentiment would go out of their way to add a review, meaning almost any management company with a large number of tenants will end up with bad ratings, as some portion of those tenants almost definitely will have a negative perception of the management and that portion will be overrepresented in the tally.
Unless it‘s a large landlord, chances are that the renter is more liquid.
I didn't find a great source on this, but the average landlord in the US seems to own 3 properties. [1]
[1]: https://www.mysmartmove.com/SmartMove/blog/todays-landlord-c...
English courts are notable for requiring the defendant to prove what they said was true. It is common practice for the world’s rich and infamous to take a trip to London whenever they want to chill their critics’ speech:
edit: I read the rest of that Wikipedia article, seems a decade ago something was done to at least reduce it -
"On January 1st, 2014 the Defamation Act 2013 came into force, requiring plaintiffs who bring actions in the courts of England and Wales alleging libel by defendants who do not live in Europe to demonstrate that the court is the most appropriate place to bring the action. Serious harm to an individual's reputation or serious financial harm to a corporation must also be proven. Good faith belief that a disclosure was in the public interest was made a defense."
That puts unreasonable level of burden on one being slandered (i.e. the victim) and would allow one doing the slander just make up stuff that is very hard to prove that the victim didn't do.
It's useful for the job seeker, and it's useful for society.
You could even have the web browser do like a mini Tor protocol where your IP is tunneled through others currently logged in.
Employees can maintain anonymity by avoiding specific work anecdotes ("My manager A did B"), using ChatGPT for rephrasing, and delaying their review (a few months after the experience).
Employers must prove the reviewer's identity for legal remedy, but Glassdoor may issue damning alerts about employers who do so. Even then, using Tor and temporary emails with fake names offers protection to the employee.
By making it difficult to both figure out who wrote the review and prove it, I think employees are safe posting their genuine exp online.
I also believe it's totally morally fine if the reviews are accurate. It may break the ToS of Glassdoor to use a fake name, for example, but an authentic peek into what's going on in corps benefits both society and Glassdoor itself.
Glassdoor has a way of dealing with this that is more damning than a bad review.
Remember, sites like this are just one piece of the puzzle when making decisions. Sure, they might not be perfect, but they can provide useful insights when taken with a grain of salt. And who knows? Maybe this website could inspire a new wave of accountability and transparency in the landlord-tenant relationship, which seems like a win to me.
But I understand the way it was designed (unverified students, double ratings, correlation of positive reviews to ease of the class...) did it in.
It boils down to how well thought through the implementation is, and how well it is iterated upon.
Same with yelp.com
It's still there and being used.
If your data isn't going to be exhaustive or unbiased samples you could at least show the omission rate. E.g. "there were 100 tenants in period X, 1 left a review".
This is why trip advisor is so useless, at least in France.
Between the vocal unhappy outliers and the happy idiots that think those french fries coming out of the freezer were delicious, the noise/signal ratio is abysmal.
The Internet shows what happens, when we don't have to be accountable for our words. Inside of almost every one of us, is a monster, waiting to burst forth, once we know the guardrails have been removed.
But the other side of the coin, is that people can be punished and silenced for legitimate concerns.
"Landlords" are, increasingly, changing from the little old lady, renting out her cottage, to huge conglomerate corporations, with the means and the desire to silence critics.
In the aggregate, we're probably better off without these types of sites, and encouraging remedy through "proper channels," which is a hard sell, as these large corporations are pretty good at owning the channels.
But some other person rented for a year and there was a complication - and how THAT was handled matters more than anything when comparing.
https://xkcd.com/325/ comes to mind.
I think a "Zillow-like" database of properties that talked about the rental and only indirectly about the landlord could be more useful.
I am sure this sounds like a great resource for people that are renting and have bad experiences but after reading this in the FAQ, I am not so sure. How do they manage fake reviews, fake reports etc. Its an open source project and by a quick look at the code on github [0], it seems like a project with a handful of commits and contributors. I cannot help but wonder how much time these folk will have for handling customer support and what process they follow to settle disputes (considering the review was posted anonymously and looks like doesn't even require an email). Generally, I would be OK if this sort of thing takes time for small projects but this project literally is about reviewing people (including names, addresses etc) from anonymous users on the internet. I'd be concerned.
And I wouldn't be surprised if this projects ends up getting legal letters very quickly if it takes off.
The sites where I left reviews were carefully patrolled by the business itself, so I often receoved responses or feedback on what I'd said. At some point I defended their practices around maintenance, and they thanked me. At another point, I was disgruntled, and they made a public reply offering to meet with me, which was disingenuous since they had no such intent.
The reality of the landlord-tenant relationship in these United States, especially at a low income level and a frighteningly low vacancy rate, is that the tenant is absolutely powerless and defenseless in any dispute. Evictions are quick, easy, and decisive. There is no lawyer who will defend tenants against landlords because there's no money in that. You can try to play the landlord-tenants rights game, but once you stick your neck out as a nuisance, all they have to do is decide not to renew your lease, and you're out in the cold. There's no recourse for that.
In contrast to that, I believe tenants are too well protected in Europe, or at least Germany, from sitting out in the cold. For example, if a tenant has not paid rent in months (and is not planning on doing so) it still is legally difficult to put them on the street. I think the term for that is squatter?! Friend of mine had damage on his property exceeding €10k until he could regain control over his apartment/flat.
Squatting falls under the principle that when a building is unused (a broad term) for a long period of time (e.g. a year), it may be squatted because there is a housing shortage and the country is owned by the civilians. And eviction is generally not straightforward because having a roof above your head is a basic right. I would say its the USA which is backwards here. I mean, WTF. If you decide your tennant has to go, they just have to deal with your decision, make their next weeks of their life revolve around your decision, no matter what? What if they are ill? Need help from others? Cannot relocate easily? Need to find a different job as a result? A one month notice is very, very short.
Btw, squatting isn't even legal anymore in The Netherlands.
It’s similar to the fact that giving homeless people a place to live for free is cheaper than continually kicking them on the streets
While it varies from place to place, this is false.
There is no lawyer who will defend tenants against landlords
There are many such lawyers.
all they have to do is decide not to renew your lease
That's true generally. If the lease says "1 year" it does not imply "n years". You seem to think that is a problem--that a contract says what it means. In some very lefty places, to be sure, tenants will stop paying and squat, and landlords have a years-long nightmare.
...
As for the article, your typical good-credit, good-income tenants who have options might actually be able to use the service to save trouble. Your typical deadbeats have to take what they can get, bad reviews or otherwise. Another potential user would be professional scammers, who might be able to discern which of the "bad" landlords are just hard-asses who expect to be paid, and so could use the service to avoid them.
And rich, really good tenants don't know the law and never need to; they pay enough that problems never occur, or if they do they throw money at it or just move away.
It's the missing middle where you have working-class to upper middle-class tenants who don't know the law and how to enforce it, and the same on the side of the landlords.
Speaking for the Bay Area, this is totally, completely, and insanely wrong. I ended up letting a tenant who had not paid rent for two months stay for an additional three months for free and keep his entire security deposit because if my lawyer didn't come to an agreement with him before they got in front of the judge (this happened at the courthouse after repeated failed negotiations beforehand), he was going to request a trial by jury, which would have delayed anything happening for at least a couple of months. This was not someone who had a lawyer or financial resources, but it was pretty apparent he had done this before (and would do it again, since our agreement meant he did not end up with an eviction on his record).
> all they have to do is decide not to renew your lease
Again, just wrong. Rent control means you don't just get to not renew a lease.
This is meaningless hyperbole. There always at least some opportunity for legal defense, in all but banana-republic jurisdictions.
Evictions are quick, easy, and decisive.
This statement is definitely at odds with reality in every major city in the U.S. In certain cities the process is in fact famously difficult, and (in the very best cases for the landlord) can take several months at least.
There is no lawyer who will defend tenants against landlords because there's no money in that.
As is this statement. Seriously, what kind of nonsense are you trying to push here?
Every major city has some form of a tenant legal aid society. They may not be able to take on every case, but they do exist.
> nonsense ... Every major city has some form of a tenant legal aid society.
As far as legal representation goes, it is dominated by landlords in NYC.
While you _can_ get a lawyer as a tenant, the housing court is set up to favor tenants not having counsel in the name of access and fairness, and they try to run things in a way that makes this tenable by quickly ruling to e.g. have the tenant pay back rent over time, or order the landlord to fix whatever etc.
If as a tenant, you do get counsel, everything changes and then the landlord holds all the cards through usual legal shenanigans like not showing up, dragging things out, having huge firms on retainer. Plus the judges decide you're not worth helping anymore since "you can afford a lawyer".
This also makes it that the vast majority of lawyers are on the landlord side as their really is "no money in it" to defend tenants and there's also no public-defender system. A legal-aid society is a band-aid at best. Even if you do pay you're getting the bottom of the barrel of lawyers who can't get any other work are the ones who represent tenants.
That's what the landlord-dominated system would have you believe.
Those who work on the tenant side (that I've known) are some of the most capable and principled professionals you'll ever meet. It's the ones who work the eviction machine who are the bottom feeders - and are viewed as such by other lawyers, accordingly.
Eventually I did retain a better lawyer (who usually represents landlords) and I can certainly agree that the firm representing the large landlord were hacks. However they had endless time to delay, not show up etc. For certain ends, "incompetent" lawyering works well as it racks up legal fees for the more competent party and can wear you down to a minimal settlement.
The power imbalance between landlords and tenants is outrageous. Tenant legal rights are rarely respected. Agencies basically ignore the needs of tenants. I cannot think of another product category where the buyer is treated so poorly - and for a service costing 1000s of dollars!
Clearly the current incentive structures are not working.
If we’re talking about the US, health insurance and time shares must be worse, no?
If a company can fire someone they just hired for basically no reason at all via a layoff, they'll be much more willing to expand quickly and be less thorough in screening applicants.
If once they hire someone, they cannot fire them for 40 years without an actual honest-to-goodness crime prosecuted; they'll be more cautious about hiring.
On the other hand, I've also lived in a town with very weak tenant's rights. When the heater broke one winter, the landlord's solution was to give me 6-8 space heaters and tell me to leave them on 24/7. Since these technically kept the temperature above 68 degrees, he had no legal obligation to do anything more.
I agree with the concept and we definitely need this. The issue, generally speaking, is that there isn't much of a business model.
This is similar to one of the anti-businesses I have long considered, except I would like to perform actual, invasive background checks on landlords. A couple others:
- A service for employees to drug-test their employers.
- A neighborhood watch app to report suspected police activity in your community.
Brokers are essentially a pure middleman with very little added value outside of connecting the owner with the tenant, so the audience here is definitely worth something.
Why would a landlord sign up for that though? A rating system or history is one thing, but what additional value would a tenant have in a landlord who passes these "invasive background checks"?
> - A service for employees to drug-test their employers.
What's the goal there? What are the incentives? Why would employers sign up to it and why would employees especially care? The system doesn't have your real or perceived injustices because there are a few evil fat-cat employers and landlords who just need to be shown the error of their ways and/or publicly shamed about their hypocrisy and driven off. It just happens as a consequence of the incentives involved.
> - A neighborhood watch app to report suspected police activity in your community.
What would be the goal? Every neighborhood group I've seen significantly features discussions about crimes and police activity. As far as I can see the most use people get out of them is being alerted to speed traps.
the question is more what disincentive would a prospective tenant have leading them to not sign up with a landlord who fails the background check. I also can't imagine there would be a system where the landlord is required to sign up.
I've met folks that decide their exes are "theirs" - my sister's ex harassed her and her now husband for some years, for example. (He's still not an upstanding person, just has less harassment. They have a child together, so no getting away).
Some folks are abusive. There is no real catch for that. Some of the abusers won't do it until living together or married: Understandably, not all victims want to talk to random services about their experience. And worse yet, the date in question might not have that many exes, so they are going to know it is you.
Similar things can happen with mental illness: It might have made the relationship rocky and contributed to the end, but you also might have enough compassion to not really want to talk about this. After all, perhaps they'd do better without the baggage of your past relationship and might have found a combination of medicines/care that works for them. (I have this: I hate my ex, but I don't actually wish them suffering)
We end up with vague information on-par with a 5-point system, one that folks aren't willing to answer in some circumstances.
Not OP, but 0.48 is the price to mail a postcard.
It would have to be run by a very dedicated volunteer with deep pockets.
Things just cost money: Be it electricity, housing, food, hosting, opportunity cost, whatever.
If you want something to be sustainable there needs to be a plan for covering the costs involved.
Life is not a fairy tale.
Everyone's life priorities and capabilities are different. Occasionally over the years I have had enough disposable income and free time to work on a passion project. Since the latest inflation wave that has gone away sadly, but before that I was able to commit a few hundred a month.
Eventually, one did get a large amount of traffic, and a handful of volunteers forming a team. While it wasn't something I could monetize, it did contribute to successful job interviews, and a temp gig working for someone who was a user of the project and gave me priority over other candidates due to seen first-hand that I was fixing things when they needed to be fixed.
Keeping the costs low can be done, some are better than others at it. Low-cost IT infrastructure still exists, even in this economy. You should go into such a project expecting to not outgrow your cheap infrastructure unless you are in fact turning it into a business. Otherwise it is wasted effort (and money).
But hardly everyone can afford to lose money like that.
Besides, it's not really possible to keep the costs low if you take into account the opportunity costs involved. Therefore it's not rational to expect that from others however I agree that it would be nice if those who can would just do.
The only way for the landlord to cheat it is to set up fake accounts with companies and get statements sent to them. Probably possible but a lot of work for 1 review
Also, if it has your name on it then it's no longer anonymous.
I have only ever felt the need to tell other people about my landlord when they were really terrible. I had a landlord that I liked once, but “getting to hang out with a cool dog sometimes” wouldn’t have compelled me to seek out and contribute to a review website.
I would simply treat anything on the site that’s even slightly more effusive than “I have had little to no reason to interact with my landlord” as patent garbage.
Great job to whoever made this. I encourage you to keep going at it and improving it until it becomes an indispensable consumer tool. Can't wait for the time where landlords have to explain themselves.
> What do I do if I receive a dishonest review?
> Landlords who believe they have received a dishonest review can report the review and include their email in the report form. We will contact you directly to address the issue.
Good luck addressing issues you can’t verify.
But that's exactly what most landlords are, unless you're renting an apartment from a massive company.
There's no point in me "reviewing them" on some random site which someone may or may not see and which has no legal authority. Now there is a permanent court record, publicly searchable by anyone online, showing that they were sued by a tenant and lost because they had done something illegal. I highly highly recommend people to sue their landlords when they do illegal and damaging things. It's not just your right, it's the right thing to do.
It almost wasn't worth it tbh. Posting a bad review is much easier and accessable
I thought what you said too before I filed the first time. It cost me $50 to file and I was able to do it by mail. It took forever to get the case heard because the landlord was a huge d-bag who intentionally dodged service for nearly two years, but I got my day in court and it took less than 20 minutes in front of a judge to be awarded my deposit back + interest + a penalty on the landlord. I showed up to court over my lunch break and was back to work before anyone knew I had left. No lawyers, just a single file folder of evidence, a $50 check, and one printed and mailed form to file.
It can sometimes be challenging to get paid, but many times it’s a manager acting improperly on behalf of a national corporate landlord and they will cut you a check immediately, they get sued so often it’s an expected business expense (says something about how scummy landlords are).
Well, if most tenants don't know their rights, then they definitely will not know this either. :)
They can’t bring one in to the court, they absolutely can spend on lawyers to prepare though. Depending on circumstances, they may also be able to countersue with a claim that exceeds the small claims limit, which will transfer the whole controversy out of small-claims court.
After that, you send this with a check in the mail to the court clerk to file, or you can take it in person to the courthouse and hand it over with a check to the clerk. The fee varies by jurisdiction, but is pretty much always less than $100. It was $50 as I mentioned the first time I sued in small claims. After you've filed, the court will serve the defendant and set a court date, this is usually done via certified mail. Depending on jurisdiction, if they don't show you get a default judgement in your favor, or you may be required to pay for personal service, which is $25-$30 for a sheriff's deputy to go to their home or place of business and personally serve them court papers. At any rate, once it's decided you can use that judgement and place a lien against their business, including accounts, properties, etc. if they do not pay you in full within 90 days of the judgement being entered by the court. Once a judgement is entered it's part of the permanent public record, which is a big reason I recommend this. There's no way for them to get this removed unlike a website review.
That's basically the process. It may differ slightly by jurisdiction, but it's relatively easy and painless. The main issue is just that you also must personally be in court on the court date, so if you move out of state you have to be willing to travel back and you usually cannot get your travel expenses covered in a small claims case, so it may not be "worth it" financially for you. For me, it's always worth it to stick it to scumbags, even if it costs me more than it gains in dollars.
Also cheaper, both in upfront cost and time, than suing (even in small claims court), and leaves suit open if you need it.
But step one in either case is knowing (or at least knowing how to research effectively when an issue comes up) what your rights are.
The problems are:
* Is the review accurate
* Is the reviewer someone who has similar standards as I
* Is the review looking at aspects I rate
* Does the reviewer have a bias (good/bad)
* Was the review based on a representative sample
It's the same for job references, service reviews, product reviews. It's almost random.
In the U.S., Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects the operator of the website.
My landlord isn't a company or a management agency, but the guy who owns the house I live in. Google and Yelp probably aren't great venues for reviewing him, except in the "infamy" sense.
As for moderation and verification, these are indeed important challenges. But with the right combination of community-driven moderation and automated systems, it's possible to create a trustworthy environment. Legal and defamation issues can be addressed through clear guidelines and by fostering a culture of constructive criticism.
Of course, blindly trusting every review isn't recommended. The key is to use these platforms as a tool, not the ultimate authority. By looking for patterns and corroborating information, tenants can make more informed decisions. It's about empowering people with information, not providing a definitive verdict.
Indeed the very existence of such a site indicates how badly the system is failing tenants. If landlords were held to account via conventional means, there would be no need for third-party rating websites at all.
There are two tough spots for landlords. There are some truly awful tenants out there. You can’t effectively screen them out.
The other hard place is lenders. Lenders soak up the margin. Unless the landlord rents out free and clear property he’s always behind, and it’s hard to maintain “his” property to provide a real service to tenants when he's collecting for the bank.
This was basically free money and the optimal thing to do was to borrow as much as you can for as long as you can.
You could put a small deposit down, and by the time you add the margin on the borrowed piece then you were yielding 10-20% on your cash in. Much better than just the 5% on unemcumbered property.
This model has completely collapsed as interest rates of normalised.
Please share more details. Because even during the pandemic, when rates were at their minimum, the lowest conventional 30 year mortgage rate that I saw was over 2.7%.
In a previous house, some things needed attention and it took the landlords forever to fix it. Same thing to give the deposit back. And they kept giving us excuses like "We're new parents. We have a baby." And even got mad at me when I requested the deposit after 3 weeks. I had plenty of compassion for them being new parents, (since we also have a young baby), but if I pay you for something, you need to treat it as a business and act professionally. Your personal problems have no place in the business...
Once you actually treat it like a business, you realize "wow this is why real estate companies don't manage single family homes as rentals" - and if you hire one to manage your property and do the math you're realize you're losing money before appreciation unless you have a small or no loan; and if that's the case you should just sell and buy into an REIT anyway.
What does that look like, and for how long?
Why? Because unless there is rigid control over who is allowed to input and some verification of that input, there will be an influx of garbage comments that will make the site completely useless. Much like YELP reviews, you can read 'em but do you actually trust what they say? Is the submitter an actual tenant, the landlord, or the landlord's family and friends? Who knows?
Secondly, I think a single lawsuit may bring it down. There have been similar private sites for tenant information that landlords shared among themselves that have been shut down by the privacy commissioner. My understanding is that this site is going to try and anonymize certain data, but Im not sure how its going to hold useful data and anonymize it enough to make a landlord unidentifiable at the same time.
Yes, everyone has a bad landlord story. But every landlord has quite a few bad tenant stories. If this site flies, prepare for the same to be done for tenants.
In my renting years I asked brokers who owned the building on numerous occasions and was told basically that’s private information. I knew this was bollocks but there’s not a lot most people can do.
This way, the market can punish bad behaviors (abusive landlords / problematic tenants) and reward those who act properly.
If you to this you're a horrible person, just like the people who made the app for landlords to collude on price hikes
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/17/1129489582/this-computer-soft...
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-evictions-monarch-in...
Thanks.
(Book a cheap hotel if you need for the first weeks. Make sure your belongings arrive by the slow route (e.g. by sea) and are re-routable when you know your definitive address.)
One approach: when a tenant gets back their deposit via the deposit protection scheme they get asked to rate their landlord and provide further feedback (data provided is private to landlord and tenant).
This is then used to score landlords (similar to credit scores) - for example if they consistently get bad reviews from tenants who got back their full deposit (so "good" tenants) their reviews get reviewed by a person and they get barred from landlording or have to pay a penalty.
It is admittedly a very elaborate process that will induce a lot of overhead, but housing market is so broken in most of the world and will probably require radical intrusive policies to fix. Making landlording less appealing/ more work by punishing bad landlording is not a bad start.
And the judges too.
I've rented in many locales over a long time. How much power the landlords have is pretty much up to local statutes. Some cities make them give you a copy of the landlord-tenant laws. In some cities, for example, if they don't make timely repairs, they may be forced to pay for your move. If they 'visit' your place without 48 hours notice (except in emergency) they've broken the law.
Adding this tenant-impowering information to a site like this would make it much more valuable.
But if the system is anonymous, what's to stop any of the following bad actor situations?
* Real tenants leave false negative reviews: people who really did have the landlord, but has some feud with the landlord unrelated to the rental, leave negative reviews.
* Fake tenants leave false negative reviews: same as above, except the people didn't actually live there, such as the landlord's competitors.
*Fake tenants leave false positive reviews: friends of the landlord, or the landlord's sockpuppet account, leave glowing reviews.
How can the site be trustworthy given that you don't know if you're reading a legitimate or fake review.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/state-landlord-tenan... https://ipropertymanagement.com/laws/landlord-tenant-rights
Now what is the best way to vet a property management firm?
For background, I own a townhome that I plan to move out of soon. I would like to keep it as a rental but do not want to manage it myself. All I've got for finding a property management firm are Google reviews (worried they are gamed) and colleagues recommendations (they will ignore the request and tell me to manage it myself).
We never actually launched it due to the possibility of it being misused in housing discrimination and our liability for hosting information that could contribute to that.
Truly there are a few bad apples in most groups that just make any progress difficult.
On the flip side, as we were installing new laundry units in the condos, I recounted to my wife about how in college we had to pay monthly for the convenience to rent laundry machines from the 80s.
but the nature of capital is such that if these websites succeed then their incentives will start to more closely align with those of the landlords.
not every problem can be solved with software.
I've pretty much never promoted it so it's quite empty, but feel free to pop over.
The zip code dropdown is broken, at least on mobile safari. Would like an input with type="number" rather than a drop down.
I plan to share this with everyone I know.
(Whenever I architect this stuff, I ask these standard questions)
There are a range of good and bad actions on both sides. Services all have some implied/stated/actual policies and ethics (or lack thereof). How exactly are tenants treated fairly? Landlords?
So far what I see are unstated policies, opaqueness around moderation and curation, and a lack of organizational and structural reputation and accountability.
We need to pay more attention to human nature and models of trust before launching and using a product. You don’t pivot to find a model of ethics and trust; is should be the foundation.
Hold on; I didn’t say that. I don’t think that landlord tenant relationships are fairly balanced in most jurisdictions.
It seems you assumed incorrectly about me. If you got my intentions wrong, how do you know you got the intentions of the website correct? Why do you assume that the website is trustworthy? (Do you?) What gives you confidence that it will put in place reasonable moderation standards?
Please, let’s try to remain calm and use logic here.
No one is assuming that.
A false dichotomy.
You don’t know me. I’ve rented in many jurisdictions. I likely share many of your values.
This is not primarily a technological problem. One key to solving this problem well is setting up the organizational structure reasonably. What legal structures are in place? Whose personal reputations are on the line? What track record do we have to go on?
Some may think these organizational things can be done later. I disagree. They should be designed before any product is launched. They are foundational.
Criticism is essential.
To paraphrase a wise person I know: sometimes the most beneficial thing we can do is not support ill-conceived projects. We can make our own assessment.
And the opposite exists and is MORE regulated in the credit bureaus and similar.
If the town is small enough there are informal whisper-networks.
And of course you can google the name of the landlord or the tenant if you want. Many bad ones of either leak tons of information on social media.
The only people who provide reviews will be people who are unhappy. And you'll only get their side.
I'm really blessed that I have a good, ethical landlord now, and even my neighbors give so little to complain about, so I just get by, and it's always smart not to stick your neck out, lest it get chopped.
I'm also seeing:
Review contents not matching star ratings, in both directions (landlord is a compulsive liar, respect: 5 stars!)
Repeats that appear to be the same disgruntled tenant posting multiple times
Landlords could also be behind some of the positive reviews. It's hard to tell.
1) gdpr/avg. You can't record data in Europe about a landlord or an address without permission.
2) landlords are not people that you want to annoy. Especially the bad ones.