Hello HN, and thank you for the kind comments! I'm one of the founders of RentHop.com.

To clarify, there are many honest brokers with exclusive no-fee listings, especially in certain neighborhoods such as West Village and Midtown East. If we banned even these brokers, then we would be missing out on a legitimate subset of the available no-fee apartments.

Our current policy is that we will only accept brokers with no-fee exclusives to post on our site (as opposed to a broker with an open listing, which is easy to detect).

In short, the legal landlord gave that broker the exclusive right to be the rental agent and-or property manager. Think of them as mom & pop versions of the big corporate leasing offices; the real landlord specifically does not want to be involved in the leasing process and paid to outsource it.