Bro, we need Glassdoor for renting…
Get paid by landlords to remove negative reviews, like yelp. Offer to show all reviews, even removed ones, to renters that pay for the premium service.
Ew, I feel gross after coming up with that idea.
Yeah. No.
“Advertise your rental property on the page where your tenants review you.”
Nonprofit … crowd funded… build it and all you need afterward are paying for servers. Then you’re just doing donations like Wikipedia. How much would would it cost to maintain such servers? Seems fundable by a wealthy liberal.
And then a wealthy slumlord does the math and finds out it’s cheaper to pay people to sabotage the website than to lose tenants due to reviews.
Just an FYI. Wikipedia is actually privately funded at this point. They don’t need donations anymore. From what I have seen of their financial statements, the donations are essentially building a slush fund for them, at this point, and have been for the last few years.
I just left a building with 4.5 stars on Google that was an absolute horrific nightmare. Somehow they had gamed the system so that all the recent very negative reviews got mostly taken down or hidden. Do NOT trust Google reviews if you have any inkling the place is sketchy. (I did but the reviews and price were good)
Indeed, while this idea should work in principle, I’ve found it mostly useless in practice.
I don’t know if all large apartment complexes are notoriously bad, but a few years ago, you’d mainly find horrifically negative reviews on those sites (likely because only people who have had issues with them actually bothered to write a review in order to get their petty revenge on them).
Nowadays, all the management companies are aware of these sites, and they likely either pay Yelp to “manage” their reviews for them and/or incentivize their tenants to leave positive reviews (even though that’s technically against the rules). Meanwhile, small buildings generally aren’t even listed on these sites or don’t have nearly enough reviews to get an objective picture.
Something like this?
References for renting? What sort of dystopia is that? I’ve never heard of that concept, luckily.
It’s common in Germany to get a “reference” from your current landlord that basically just says “paid rent on time and didn’t set anything on fire”.
Huh. Here we have registries for people who habitually don’t pay on time, with a cooldown once they’re caught up. If you’re not in the registry it’s assumed that you’re good.
It is? I’m german and I’ve rented my entire life and never got anything like it nor needed anything like it to rent.
not a thing i’ve ever heard of in sweden, either apartments are just expensive or you need to sign up for a waiting list and maintain your spot for like 7 years until you have the queue points needed for the apartment you want to rent
What? Seven years for an apartment? I know people that buy and sell their homes more often than that.
doesnt croatia have a really low percentage of people who live in rent (as opposed to owing the property or living with relatives eho own it)
One apartment I lived in was rented out by a private landlord, and there we had the option to write a personal letter/application which would allow us to skip the queue if we matched what they were looking for. We had just become a family of three and they wanted more families with children so we were approved. That was completely voluntary though. In honesty, I think it’s kind of weird that we could jump the queue but we were no longer allowed to live in my student apartment so we jumped on it.
That was completely voluntary though
The problem with power imbalances is that they allow enforcing “completely voluntary” practices.
I’m having to do that now. Three years prior renting needs to be accounted for. I left on very bad terms with my previous landlord but I had to give the information over because it showed up on my history check and they refused to let my application be complete without it. So we’ll see wtf is gonna happen…
That’s sad. There could be so many reasons for disagreements. As long as you paid you shouldn’t be forced to do this. Best of luck.
Disagreement is a light way of putting it. 😅
It went full-on, lawyers-involved horseshit from her freaking out about trivial shit. So it’s a guarantee that her response to any inquiry will be negative. Fun!
Thanks for the kind words, I should find out later today whether she’s blocked me from getting a place.
I had a disagreement with my previous landlord. He included power in the rent (not uncommon here) and I have a home lab.
He was not happy with the electrical bill and accused me of mining Bitcoin.
Sir, this hardware is from 2010, and couldn’t possibly mine a single Bitcoin in the time it has remaining to run before it dies.
He threatened to evict me, I took his eviction threat documentation to a lawyer who basically told me that “this is not sufficient grounds to evict” (more or less he just laughed at how dumb it was), and I promptly ignored it. Moved out when my lease was up. There were a ton of other problems I won’t get into. When he showed it to new potential renters some showed up before the agent who was showing the place and we gave them a warning about the landlord. I’m sure someone rented it eventually, but hopefully we saved a couple of people from going through all that.
I actually like the idea of landlords covering electricity or at least a portion of it. It incentives them to install things like heat pumps which have a high up front cost but long term savings. If they aren’t sweating the long term loss then why would they upgrade?
Wait, you only have to give a reference for a place to rent? Here in Ireland (Dublin) you need a scan of your passport, government id, work reference, housing reference, and at least bank statements from the last three months.
What the actual fuck? You renting a basement apartment or applying for a mortgage?
It’s basically the same process. The ideal tenant is someone that can’t afford a mortgage by the slimmest of margins.
Room or studio apartment.
https://www.daft.ie/for-rent/studio-apartment-1-dublin-20-dublin-20/5704336
“Verifiable reference’s essential Verifiable affordability essential”
The passport, government id, and work reference are all to make sure you can “afford” to live there.
I’m going through the process right now in Kansas City Missouri and it seems like it varies from place to place. Leasing agencies seem to be the worst. One of these required everything you mention above except the passport scan, and it was 1.5 months of paycheck stubs from your employer.
Some landlords will give good recommendations for shitty tenants, just so they can get rid of them.
One guy I bothered every day about his other tenant stomping across my ceiling. That landlord gave me a fantastic recommendation because he was tired of having to do any effort whatsoever instead of just receiving money for doing nothing.
I saw that tenant as I was moving out, “I don’t understand the problem, I always wore my indoor boots?” Fuck apartments lol.
Catch 22 for everyone trying to move out of their parent’s home when they specifically state the references can’t be family.