Michelle's List: A free, anonymous landlord review site
michelleslist.com
michelleslist.com
> 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.
Sounds like it’s anonymous to me :)
That’s how governments like to run things: https://community.qbix.com/t/transparency-in-government/234
None of this would make the site lose its primary function, which is by their own admission to do a background check on the landlord you’re about to sign an agreement with.
[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=Aberdeen+St%2C+Chicago%2C+IL...
It only takes one. And if it’s been automated, you’ve just made it plain text but with extra steps.
Bcrypt has key stretching, brute-forcing every address in existence would cost a lot of CPU even for one city. How will the attacker get compensated for that?
I honestly don’t get why I even have to explain this. The original question was how anonymous it can get. Any practice that reduces the amount of personal information, or the ease to access it, helps, period. Dismissing one because it doesn’t offer perfect protection is like not using condoms because they are ineffective against mono. There is no reason not to implement them - that is, if the maintainer actually cares about privacy.
What it does solve is the problem of this data being visible to every landlord who types the address of their property into a vastly more popular search engine known as Google. They need not even know of this site, it gets served to them on a silver platter.
And if you think a robots.txt alone solves that, you’re mistaken. A robots.txt is just a recommendation. Web crawlers are not obligated to honor it. The only way to solve it is to make sure the private data isn’t even there in the first place.
Regardless, if the info did get leaked or the landlord did some basic investigation, or the property was just small enough that the data pool was small, what’s to keep the tenant from litigation by the landlord?
I’m thinking about all those review-sites for hospitality where a bad review starts a whole lot of grief for the reviewer.
How are they leaking the information to google? Our, if you’re unwilling to share the details, how much is revealed?
googletagmanager.com
Is that your point? That is, do you mean that the website uses google's ads, which can collect user data and google might identify the website's users based on that?
Which implies they store the information. If it was anonymous they wouldn't store identifying information.
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.
it's much better than the taxi of yore. It's not the perfect outcome, but it's an improvement nevertheless.
But yea, slick app. I hear the drivers are sometimes less racist, too.
The drivers were then exploited ruthlessly by medallion-owners.
Uber became very popular very quickly because it addressed a number of those consumer pain points up front. You could know for sure if a car was going to come, have a quite good idea of how long it would be, and get a price in advance. Sure, your complaints would likely be ignored, but nothing new there.
I still don't think Uber was a good outcome, even if it was better in many ways.
Then when you wanted to go home you’d do the same thing except out on the street and you’d steal the first unattended cab, regardless of who’d called them.
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.
Sure, it's not "at-will" and you can fight it, but it sure does feel lopsided if you can be told at any moment to find another place to live in one week for any one of a host of reasons you "agreed" to that change constantly.
Contracts just generally can't preempt rights. Of course, the type of contract is important. Ordinary residential tenants have rights. If you're a commercial tenant, any imaginable conditions are possible.
[1] https://selfhelp.courts.ca.gov/eviction-tenant/notice-types
They were clearly boilerplate forms, from several sources (hence the overlap and contradictions), "If any terms of this Addendum conflict with the Lease, the terms of this Addendum shall be controlling," etc., 6 documents and 20 pages after some other terms on the same subject. I claim to have read it, but I make no claims about having understood it.
There is an asymmetry of resources here that gives a large property management company a lot of ability to make your life unpleasant (and rent control gives them a good reason to want to). By the time you end up in court you have already lost.
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.
That's how laws are supposed to work. If a landlord is foolish enough to put an illegal punitive clause in a lease, they should be punished.
Having actually gone through this process in small claims court in California, I will say that your miles may vary. I completely won my case except for recovering the fifty dollar late fee (written into the lease) that I paid because rent was once a day late. The judge said it seemed "reasonable" and didn't listen to me talk about California "liquidated damages" language on the subject, which is the supposed law that makes late fees illegal.
Fact is, most places I've rented from have had late fees, and recovering them sounds like a huge crapshoot at best.
I chose to sell instead of renting out due to the risk of relying on someone else to maintain it's mortgage.
Why do we treat landlords as a business type that simply isn't allowed to take a loss?
Try doing consulting work and see how long it takes businesses to pay out your invoices. Be a B2B company, and see how long it takes businesses to pay out your invoices. Are they going to be willing to pay a late payment fee? Ask your accounting team what their average payout time is for accounts receivable.
The difference between these cases is power dynamic. Landlords have extreme levels of power over tenants. If it's legal to charge a fee for a late payment, the tenant either has a choice of paying a fee or having no home. It's an unfair balance, and the government shouldn't allow this to exist.
In California, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the tenant.
Perhaps:
1. Other locations that aren't ATX use traditional risk management
2. The laws in ATX are different than elsewhere
3. ATX apartments compete for residents by offering low deposits as a loss-leader
It's not just "broken". It's designed that way to benefit large financial groups.
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.
I am not sure there is a single term that fits, but "co-op" (cooperative) housing is close.
At least a couple of percent of apartments are always "empty", because there is often a gap between tenants. Many people have second homes, but those are technically "empty". Airbnbs are "empty". And so on.
I’m not sure how many apartments would be considered “empty” by official numbers but probably something similar.
This is a text book example of the problem with rental price controls. The law benefits current renters, but fucks over future/potential renters (because landlords are unwilling to take the risk of renting out a property unless the situation is ideal). Eventually the harm of the law outweighs the benefit.
It’s much more complicated than that of course, but that’s the general essence of it.
The harm of the laws by no way outweighs the benefits. We would absolutely tear tenants asunder without those laws. They are, however, outdated. Probably because they were created long before private equity funds basically took over every major city. The “easy” fix would be to tax apartments which are kept empty, but again, there isn’t much of a political interest in this because the housing market sort of relies on the high rent.
Today, with a bit higher interest rates, it becomes more expensive to hold the property empty and the prices do not appreciate or at least not as fast. However, I believe we have not yet seen the effect of these interest rate increases as the landlords typically have long-term fixed borrowing costs which do not need to be renewed until a few years for most of them so unless the interest rates continue to stay at current levels or higher for many years this situation will maybe not improve.
At least in the US this happens due to rent control rules. When the landlord knows that once they lock in a renter they won't be able to raise prices much for an undetermined amount of time (what if the renter decides to stay there for 30 years!), they have an incentive to make the starting rent as high as possible.
If they knew they can raise prices when needed, they could afford to lower prices in a downturn knowing they can raise later.
No way, the vast majority of the US has no rent control at all. Landlords can already raise prices whenever they want, it's always been legal. Despite this, most choose to put in 10% to 40% increase, every single year, anyway. - https://www.michiganpublic.org/economy/2023-03-22/as-housing...
> If they knew they can raise prices when needed, they could afford to lower prices in a downturn knowing they can raise later.
The only time a landlord will lower prices, is if a downturn is so severe that the Federal Government prevents landlords from accessing credit to wait out that downturn, and the landlord risks having to actually sell the property. (Which after 2008, it seems unlikely that the Feds would ever let the market correct again)
Not sure how to interpret this response. I said "due to rent control rules". So this applies when rent control rules are in place and landlords cannot raise rents more than rent control allows. If you are in a place that doesn't have rent control, well then it doesn't apply.
> most choose to put in 10% to 40% increase, every single year
I suggest you do the math on this one to see if it possible.
Let's take the middle of your range, 25%. If a landlord raised rents 25% "every single year", a $2K rent would be $15k in just ten years. So, no, no landlord is doing that.
> Federal Government prevents landlords from accessing credit to wait out that downturn
Tell me more about this program where the government gives landlords credit to wait out the downturn? Not familiar with it.
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
Often illegal, but still common here as well.
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.
Not all people and and places are equal: It's not a universal truth that someone given 30 days notice will find themselves unhoused and in a dangerous situation. Often it is just a sense.
And even where it is true: What then? If landlords are made the social safety-net of last resort, the 'guaranteed fallback', for people who are unable to secure housing then why should anyone be a landlord? It won't be easier to secure housing for people if the conditions are made too unattractive.
Some landlords stink, some tenants stink, sometimes the situation stinks without anyone being at fault. Policy ought to try to do the most good for the most people, but part of that is recognizing that an inability to evict people who don't pay (or worse) can mean that even more go unhoused when people choose to not rent out.
Given the situation that there is no safety net, and knowing that, why would you choose a relationship that is likely to position your financial interests against the physical safety and wellbeing of someone else, even a whole family?
I wouldn't choose it and I don't have respect or sympathy for people who do.
The housing market is broken because in most markets there's a company helping landlords price fix the market. Landlords in most of the US have considerably more power than the tenant and this is especially true in the south eastern part of the US where most major cities allow evictions without cause with sufficient notice (usually 2-3 month notice) and extremely fast evictions with cause (~10-15 day notice). Rent control is effectively non-existent.
I sympathize a bit with small landlords in California or New York, but things are rigged in your favor most other places.
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.
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”.
Is that not something your homeowners insurance would have covered?
You really don't see the difference? I'll help you out: one is a basic (and at the moment, scarce) necessity, the other is a unnecessary luxury.
So the most basic sufficient shelter delivered in the most cost efficient way is the “need”? No, human dignity needs to be respected - but what does that mean? Does the shelter need to be where people want it, regardless of the cost? That’s where tradeoffs start to happen, and at some point those tradeoffs culminate in a market and that market is made up of tenants and landlords.
Being awful is a problem, be it in housing or SaaS.
- 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.
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.
They think it is a good idea and that people are nice.
I give it 3-6 months until they realize how many downsides that idea has and close down.
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.
I think Angi(e) is real but maybe others are not. What's often not real is the purported independence.
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.
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.
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.
They can evict the tenant in a retaliatory manner, or if what they wrote qualifies as libelous, take them to court easily.
So the incentive to write fake reviews to steer competition away is just not there.
This doesn't mean that there won't be fake reviews, just that worrying about fake reviews of this particular sort doesn't make much sense.
Or how about a neighbor who values quietness and doesn't want the landlord to be able to rent out the apartment?
Since it's "anonymous" multiple parties could have incentives to write negative reviews.
I’d argue the bigger issue is bogus reviews in favor of landlords.
Open Google Maps, pick any apartment complex. You’ll see lots of 4-5 stars for “Great tour!” “Staff were so friendly to show me around!” “I’ve lived here 1 month and it’s PERFECT”
These reviews are disingenuous.
Some landlords encourage prospective tenants and tenants with bonuses to quickly rush out a review before any actual behavior can be observed.
What’s stopping a sour neighbor from marking a unit as a business in Google Maps and tossing on a bad review?
An apartment will have 1 review every 1-2 years at most. Any fake review will substantially influence the landlord.
For large apartment complexes, Google Maps and Yelp already handle those. What’s left are small time mom and pop landlords. That’s what this website is aiming for based on my observations.
EG say they on average interview 3 tenants before they pick one and take 4 days to get one inquiry after listing a property convincing fully 1/3 of tenants to give them a big miss would result in the property being vacant for an extra 4 days every 3 years. Meanwhile they will be pricing their property based on prevailing prices for units like theirs.
This strategy would not be expected to work so few people are going to make unfairly negative reviews about places they already live.
I would actually expect to see
1) Fake positive reviews by management/owners
2) Unfair negative reviews by people who were themselves problematic
3) Apartments trying to force people not to review them as a condition of tenancy and trying to unmask reviewers to sue them
4) People trying to get negative reviews removed with hallow or real legal threats
5) Fake negative reviews by competition
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
I don't think it is surprising that if you don't contribute value to society as judged by society you will be shunned by society. Evolution is based on contribution and accounts for the a time period where you will be a burden to the time period where you should be contributing.
Please cite this causal pathway in research
Specifically can you show, in some kind of documented research, that genetic fitness and likelihood for offspring reproduction success (Evolutionary fitness), is causally linked with agent actions in a specific distinguishing state transition between non-burden and burden states.
Also please tell me how these states are measured and through what mechanism
It should also account for things like: Why political prisoners (burdens or the shunned by society) are later asked to be leaders, eg Nelson Mandela etc... given that he had many different children across the entirety of his active periods (exceptionally fit evolutionary)
What are you talking about?
Explain to me the felicific calculus for determining grandparent equity in the year 1375
At no point does “what is management like?” come into the equation.
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.
If you are one of the organizations listed in paragraph 2 above and are interested in linking to our website, you must inform us by sending an e-mail to Michelle's List. Please include your name, your organization name, contact information as well as the URL of your site, a list of any URLs from which you intend to link to our Website, and a list of the URLs on our site to which you would like to link. Wait 2-3 weeks for a response."
ok then... good luck with that one