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Comment by chaosharmonic | Hacker News Reader

Posting to Craigslist because the landlords are too lazy to do it themselves is a reasonable part of the transaction cost?

And the thing is that it's not voluntary any more than grocery shopping is. You can maybe make a point about where (sort of -- where I live, this practice is actually allowed statewide, so it's not strictly a rural/urban divide), but that's a separate axis from whether or not people need places to live. (Theoretically buying is an option, but if renting is inaccessible, it's unlikely that you're really looking at homeownership either.)

This is just the same laissez-faire capitalism that gave us Ticketmaster, right down to being an identical business model.

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Yes, it is definitely reasonable. Why wouldn't it be?

I'm not sure what point you're making about Ticketmaster. That business is completely different from the rental market (for example, there are probably literally a million times as many providers).

Both practices are effectively drip pricing, is my point. In the case of landlords you're right that there are a glut of "providers" (and I'm not sure I agree with that terminology per se but mechanically it works), but the thing you have to sift through a horde of ads for one that doesn't. And even then, it's largely guessing, because they're not actually required to tell you that in the ad itself -- sometimes you have to actually go through the whole process of reaching out to a human, maybe getting a response, and then finding out.

And unlike other up-front costs (first/last/security) it doesn't actually provide value to a tenant in any way. It's a third party that is really only acting on behalf of a landlord, never mind the part where we're talking about literal rent-seeking.

Essentially, it's deceptive advertising, that makes for a less fair and accessible marketplace to consumers. Especially in any remotely competitive rental market (which is a lot of them now, given the way prices have skyrocketed in recent years relative to pay), it's easy to get stuck paying an exorbitant fee simply for lack of a clear way to find out which places don't expect you to pay the third party they contracted.

And that's not a free market either.

I agree with you that markets function better when prices are transparent, and that there is a potential positive role for carefully designed regulation to improve such matters.

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