The assumption that software can solve this problem is simply wrong. It's the regulation change that needs to happen if you don't want that renter pay the broker "services".
For example, a new law in Germany to apply the "who hires pays" principle for brokers in the renting market basically made the renting "broker fee free" for renters. Previously, the landlords would hire a broker that needed to be paid by the renter. Why not, it doesn't cost them anything, and at least they don't need to have a contact with the potential renters. Now, that they have to pay for the brokers service themselves, it's suddenly not that valuable to them.
No, in the case of NYT brokers, software would solve the problem of NYC brokers, by putting them out of a job.
If you're from Germany, you have nothing to compare these people to, they run a racket that would be illegal there to begin with. They're nothing like the kind of rental agencies in Germany, they are individuals who basically figured out how to scalp entire buildings worth of apartments.
Op suggested regulation. I.e. making certain practices illegal. You responded:
> they run a racket that would be illegal there to begin with.
Perhaps making it illegal in nyc as well, as op suggested, is the solution? Rather than letting a tech company replace the scalpers with a scalping monopoly
And how realistic, exactly, do you think getting regulation pushed through in NYC is, exactly? Unless there is true citizen outrage (and there will never be, given what market we're talking about), you're going to need lobbied buy-in from currently sitting politicians and their successors. So if you're lucky, maybe you'll get something tentative in 2040.
In the mean time: software can solve this problem now. Now sounds good.
Software can displace a middle man, and replace it with a monopoly. Once monopoly power is in place, Software will then become more and more expensive until it is as bad or worse than what it supplanted. Investors will get rich, there will be a brief bubble where some people will get a VC-funded good deal, and then nobody else wins.
You're going to have to work a lot harder to argue the connection between the first and second part of that first sentence, because one does not lead to the other. You might be right --I don't think you are, but you might be-- but right now that sentence means nothing, and that fully undermines whatever point you're trying to argue.
Are you saying that you don't think startups seek to displace middle men and create monopolies? or are you saying companies with monopolies don't exploit those to overcharge people as much as possible?
Because neither of those statements is exactly controversial.
What I think, and what you think, is irrelevant. Back up your claims, or they're just you trying to convince yourself you know something you don't.
Cutting out the middle man does not by definition lead to monopolies, especially not when the market has tens of thousands of sellers (if not orders of magnitude more), and tens of thousands of buyers (or, renters, in this case. And again, if not orders of magnitudes more).
It’s not cutting out the middle man - it’s replacing the middle man with a software middle man. The only way that doesn’t lead to a monopoly is if there are multiple software middle men competing. Like, do you actually believe that uber is just a platform connecting buyers (riders) with sellers (drivers)? It’s a taxi company. It replaced a dozen taxi companies in each city with a monopoly or an duopoly (when lyft is also present).
It can't be quite this simple. If your renter is paying $X to you plus $Y to your broker, then their willingness to pay for the apartment was at least $X+Y, and you're leaving at least $Y on the table. In theory there should be a lot of market pressure to shrink Y. So the question becomes, what transaction costs are getting in the way of that? Or maybe, is the $Y actually buying something that's of value to the landlord?
> "who hires pays" principle for brokers in the renting market basically made the renting "broker fee free" for renters.
How can that work? Landlord (absent regulation) set the rents as high as they want/can get away with. What's the difference between 100/month rent + 50/month broker fee, and 150/month rent + "zero"/month broker fee?
In Germany, the broker fee is a one time payment. That makes for an complicated calculation, as rentals are usually not fixed-term, and people will expect to stay for several years or decades. Is 900 EUR per month + 1,800 Euro one time payment better or worse than 1,000 Euro per month without a broker fee? Most people do not think like that. 900 < 1,000 Euro, end of story.
Of course, the real problem was that the landlords did not both to negotiate the brokers fee. There was a maximum broker fee defined by law, and everyone just charged the maximum. Not anymore!
The broker fee IME is usually an extra month of rent due at the time of signing the lease. Because in certain cities the vast majority of apartments will follow this convention, and it's not really something that will be mentioned until you're in the process of formally applying (unless you ask), I don't see it having a market effect in the same way that raising the rent would.
German landlords can't set the rent as high as they want, for starters. At least not in Berlin with the Mietpreisbremse capping how high rent can be relative to the past, and to the neighbourhood.
I find that German law idiotic. Of course it costs the landlord something to hire a broker, even if the renter is supposed to pay the fee. It still eats into the overall budget of the renter, that could otherwise have gone to the landlord.
You can find it idiotic, but finding a tenant is quite easy in popular places, so instead of finding a way to increase the overall price (which is also regulated), the landlords often just do it themself. In unpopular places, it is hard to increase the price.
> So the landlords just make the rent more expensive to account for having to pay the broker, what changed?
Nothing.
Clearly brokers are doing something or else people wouldn't pay for them.
My theory is the broker fee has positive selection for wealthier tenants, which for every property - low or high rent - makes for an economically better tenant. Raising the rent has the same effect. We care that there's cheap rent because shelter is a basic human right, and we appreciate that spending tons of money on rent couldn't possibly be good in a positivist economic sense, but of course raising the rent also selects for a wealthier tenant.
Replacing the brokers with software has a similar effect. If your users feel comfortable using a complicated website with no human beings involved, they are going to be wealthier.
This comes up everywhere. For example Oscar selects for a healthier insurance pool by being a complicated app - old people want real human beings to talk to and are turned off by apps, and they are also more expensive for insurance to carry, so it's a "win" for Oscar. Credit card only restaurants with lines make higher revenue because lower-ticket cash paying customers are substituted by higher-ticket credit card paying ones. And the iPhone is a $800 phone versus a $300 Android one, no wonder iPhone users spend 2-5x as much on IAP.
> Clearly brokers are doing something or else people wouldn't pay for them.
They were, pre-internet. It actually made sense then in NYC with such complicated and massive amounts of inventory.
They don't make sense anymore. The only reason they still exist is because lazy landlords just want to stick with the system they've always known, because it feels "free" to them. In reality they get lower rents, but that's harder for them to see. And it's a problem of coordination -- as long as most other properties use brokers, you really don't have a reason to change.
The slow increase of no-fee listings has changed that. But it's still slow, and a lot of it is new buildings. It's hard to get landlords who have done things the same way for 40 years to change.
> Clearly brokers are doing something or else people wouldn't pay for them.
In many cases (not talking about NYC here), what they're doing is simply blocking access to an apartment. You see an apartment, you have to deal with the broker / real-estate agent / makelaar. Or - you don't even see it in the first place, since it's only available via an agency.
This is similar to setting up a roadblock and collecting a transit tax; or the "troll under the bridge" from folk tales.
That being said - In some cases and some places brokers can help apartment seekers filter relevant apartments, and can help convince both the seeker and the landlord to compromise, agree to some arrangements to seal the deal. Another benefit of such type of apartment brokerage is that a broker with a minimum of reputation would not try to scam you (rent contract scams are a thing in some countries); and may be able to exert some pressure if, say, some serious problem is revealed right after you move in and the landlord doesn't want to address it.
It also solves the problem of having to source tenants and do all the legwork around that which is a pain in the ass part of owning property. Especially if you own many properties.
It's not unlike the role a recruiter plays for jobs.
> Clearly brokers are doing something or else people wouldn't pay for them.
Just like the real estate agent business. Sellers have the option to sell it themselves, or use an agent. Agents do better and more organized marketing, handle the paperwork for the transaction, and offer help in prepping/staging the house. Etc.
They're also creating an implicit discount for longer-term tenants (which is good for landlords).
When I rented my place in NYC some years ago, the broker fee was meaningful to me. Once I paid it, I was less likely to want to move since I'd have to pay it again vs renewing my existing lease which did not involve another broker fee.
This is a fallacy, at least in NY. I asked my last landlord about this. I asked "if brokers can't charge renters their fee will you pay it instead?". He replied immediately, "no way, I'll just ask my nephew to show the apartments instead". I had just paid a 12% fee to a broker a year earlier with this same landlord! Thousands of dollars. The broker did very little for this exorbitant fee, they opened a door for a dozen people maybe, and uploaded a few pictures online. They were simply the gate-keeper and I had no choice in the matter.
The only reason landlords deal with them is that it's easier for them to do so, so why not. It's pervasive enough, as a quirk of history, that it's tolerated. They certainly do not provide value that matches up with their fees in most cases.
Rents may go up, but it will be only a fraction of the insane fees retail brokers in NY charge. It needs to change.
That's exactly what happened in Germany. As soon as the landlords had to pay the brokers out of their pockets, they quickly realized that the "service" is not worth that much for them, so many went without brokers, and the ones that still kept brokers had to pay them much less than before, and the price was related to actual service provided.
It addresses the principle-agent problem[0]. Yes, renters that want a broker may simply raise the rent to pay for it, but doing so affects their own bottom line because either (1) it's harder to find a renter at that higher price or (2) they could have found a renter without a broker and pocketed the higher rent themselves.
Both of those things happen regardless of who formally pays the fee: one side of the transaction has a desirable good (apartment) the other side only has money to bargain with, so it's obvious from who's pocket the fee will come from. Many times the buyer would openly raise that argument in negotiations: "You know, I have all those fees to pay, can you lower the rent a bit?". It's not like sellers are completely oblivious to fees paid by a buyer.
> so it's obvious from who's pocket the fee will come from.
Yes. The problem is that the one whose pocket the money comes from is not the one who selects the broker. Thus the person with the financial incentive to make that choice wisely is not the one making the choice. This is why it's a principle-agent problem.
My point is that landlords still do realize that "more money for the broker == less money for me", even if this money is not coming directly from their pocket. So they still have incentive to choose a cheap one.
I'm honestly not sure to what extent that is true. I definitely don't think it is 1 to 1. Apartments are advertised at $X rent per month. The broker fee is just an extra month of rent due at signing, it is not reflected in the main list price.
The majority of apartments in certain cities charge this fee, so if you care to find one that doesn't you'd have to look for advertisements explicitly mentioning "no agent/broker fee". Maybe it's just my circle, but even the people I know that will look in less desirable locations for cheaper rent do not bother to look for this. It's also not far off from various psychological tricks seen in business - consumers do not behave rationally.
I'd argue it's even a bit worse than other sticker price bait and switch situations, because how many people know to look for this? Mostly only people that have signed a lease in one of these cities before, which for a place with a lot of transplants and subletting can be a surprisingly small number.
At some point I wouldn't even call it irrational to ignore the fee. Once you've decided on a place and receive the rental app to fill out, are you really going to turn back because you found out about the agent fee? Especially as time runs out to find a place and you realize more than half of them do the exact same thing?
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if some landlords have come to an agreement with the agent they use to get a bit of a kickback from the broker fee, unbeknownst to the buyer.
When the person choosing the broker is the same one that pays, it creates competition on fees. The renter cannot choose to change the agent to a cheaper one. They have to deal with whatever agent the landlord has chosen.
It works similarly when software is chosen by people who have to use it versus those who do not. IDEs and text editors are usually chosen by the users, so there is competition on usability between different options. Timesheet and other HR software are usually chosen by upper management, and the people actually using them cannot switch, so there is not the same kind of competition on usability. Instead, they compete on other things that make them more appealing to those who can make the decision.
Actually the brokers' prices fell drastically in response to this law. Probably because the landlords now have an incentive to take the cheapest broker.
That's like saying rent prices depend on the will of god. Retroactively, you can justify this claim regardless of what happened: "It was god's will" or "You had to adapt your price to the demand".
I liked the idea of that law, but in high-density areas, it didn't change anything. The renters are now implicitly expected to cover the broker fee for thee landlord. If they don't offer that in advance, they won't get the apartment.
I've never seen it go towards first month's rent, but that's not the point. The money isn't going to the landlord or the tenant, but to the data aggregators.
A lot of it is highly manual on the back end, calling and faxing random state agencies. It’s not like it’s a 90% operating margin business or a lot of companies would be getting in and driving pricing down.
Nonsense. Spamming applications is strictly better than spamming low-information contact requests, and nobody seems to mind that. Instead you'll get structured applicant information that can be filtered against.
Yeah it's pretty atrocious. They're so useless. It's such a feel-bad experience working with them, knowing they're not helping at all, and knowing you have to pay them thousands of dollars if you want the apartment - for nothing.
What's worse is when they try to pretend like you're actually getting value for the crazy fee they charge.
"Now, I'm you're broker so if there are any problems throughout the lease, feel free to contact me. This isn't just a one time thing!"
We literally emailed/called him two weeks later and he ghosted us.
When we were moving out of our apartment when our lease was up, he was around showing another unit, introduced himself, asked us how long we lived there, etc
Yeah, last year it had briefly seemed that broker's fees had become illegal, but this year that was "clarified" and now they're definitively legal again. [1] [2]
Previously it had seemed like nothing could get rid of them -- landlords mostly didn't care since it was mostly tenants who paid them in the end.
But COVID suddenly made everyone a bit more willing to consider other options (like virtual tours), and with some rents down landlords are perhaps a bit more willing to realize that if there's no broker's fee, tenants can pay a little more.
I'm actually really excited about this lockbox technology, I genuinely think it could be the key to "unlocking" competition again.
My only concern is that a lot of buildings don't have anything obvious in the front to lock it to, as well as plenty of buildings prohibiting tenants from storing keys in lockboxes in front, both because anyone can take a hammer to one and smash it to get the building key, and also because they don't trust it's not someone running an AirBNB.
What's worse is they also employ high pressure sales tactics to get tenants to settle asap. Young professionals and students moving to the city for the first time are their bread and butter, along with people who decided to end their current lease and have 30 short days to find a new spot.
While searching for my current apartment, I was month-to-month on my previous NYC lease and was therefore 1) not a complete noob to the city and 2) could be super picky and I kept getting the sense brokers had no patience for someone like me.
Not sure why you are surprised or annoyed by this. It doesn't matter what you sell, aren't you going to avoid the self-described "super picky" customer? Salespeople work on volume, a customer like you is a time suck with limited probability of resulting in a sale. You're welcome to be as selective as you like, but certainly don't expect salespeople to want to deal with you.
"Customer" is an interesting word choice for someone who receives literally 0 value from the agent. Especially now with the internet, but even before with school/work connections, the majority of students/transplants will find their own apartment. They then have to pay the broker fee to whatever agent their chosen landlord has decided to use, in exchange for being a middleman with paperwork.
Many of the prospective tenants do not even find out about this until it is time to officially apply! Since there is usually a deadline to find an apartment, and most apartments will have (proportionally) the same exact fee, the "customer" is really a captive.
Ironically, the person you are replying to tried to actually be a customer with the agent, but since these people have no need to sell apartments (they will sell themselves in NYC and Boston), you're right - why bother? The real key is to become buddies with a few landlords, that's where to spend time.
The agent isn't the one doing the connecting, that's my point. Most landlords I know "write" their own listings using a standard template and reusing old photos. Circulating this is trivial, especially in a hot housing market. A few of the landlords I know are older and will pass the info to an agent to paste into popular sites. But I'd hardly call that "connecting" and certainly not worth thousands of dollars.
Additionally, the landlords will often give first dibs to internal housing sites for local universities or to other current tenants to spread to their network. So it frequently doesn't even require posting on a public site, and in these cases the agent only becomes involved in the situation when it is time to fill out the rental app. This is especially common when people move for grad school or choose to stay after undergrad and want to live near their peers/friends. So you can imagine the sheer amount of money that gets collected for 0 return in Boston.
I'm not against real estate agent commissions in general obviously, but the way rental brokerage fees work is an absolute scam in parts of the US.
This whole discussion is so bizarre to me, since I've only been a tenant in the SF Bay Area. We don't seem to have brokers here, or at least I've never heard of them. If the landlord pays a property manager or realtor to show the place, that's, on their end and not an additional fee (in fact, non-refundable deposits are illegal in SF). Some people who are used to this broker system seem to assume it *must" be adding some value but I can attest that it doesn't.
> it *must" be adding some value but I can attest that it doesn't
And yet, landlords keep using it. A $2500/month apt in NYC will cost $34,500 the first year -- but only $30,000 goes to the landlord. Can you help explain why a landlord would freely give up $4500 (standard 15% fee) in potential revenue?
As I understand it, the difference between the broker system in NYC and the one I'm familiar with is that the tenant is obliged to pay the broker some amount directly. I've seen rental condos shown by realtors and property managers - presumably landlords pay these people although I'm not familiar with the standard rate.
Yes you are right about NYC, and the same is true in Boston - it's been explained repeatedly in this thread why the broker fee is not at all equivalent to a landlord giving up that money, but for some reason there are commenters that just keep repeating the same line about a perfectly rational market instead of engaging with the actual arguments presented.
For someone new to the market it is essentially a hidden fee you find out about at buy time. Since 90% of places do this it would be a huge hassle for a tenant to try to avoid the fee, especially with the pressures surrounding shopping for housing. It's not the same at all as changing a list price.
> Most landlords I know "write" their own listings using a standard template and reusing old photos
So, like Airbnb? Last I checked, that platform -- without a person -- also charges renters about 15% or more. And you don't even get to actually visit the place before you commit to paying the fee!
The landlords are the ones writing the listing, the agent is the one collecting the money for supposedly "connecting" someone, when AT MOST all they did was post it onto a couple websites like AirBnB. I have no problem with the fee a website collects for listings. They provided a service that allowed the listing to be spread. But the agent is now just an unnecessary middleman between the landlord and such services. 9 times out of 10 real estate agents don't meaningfully contribute to the matching of landlord/tenant in the NYC or Boston markets, yet they continue to collect a fee. And as I mentioned this happens even when it is provable that the prospective tenant found the apartment via a source 100% unrelated to the real estate agent (such as a friend in a different unit).
Before you try to argue that landlords wouldn't pay them if they didn't contribute - the landlord doesn't pay! In cities where the landlord has to pay, you will find agents are used much less often and charge cheaper prices for these sort of rental services. The problem is when the landlord chooses the agent but the tenant has to pay. Every agent just charges the max allowable fee, and the majority of landlords stick with this scheme, whether out of stubbornness, loyalty, or kickbacks I don't know - but it hurts tenants far more than landlords. Otherwise you are correct, landlords would stop using them unless their prices went down!
Let me know when a real estate agent makes their own website that gains traction across the city.
It'd be interesting to see if that fixed the problem or just replaced one parasite with another.
Many software companies fix the problem, disrupt rent-seekers with reduced costs, only to later become rent-seekers that have the market power to increase costs.
If evictions didn’t take 3-6 months minimum in NYC (even pre-COVID), landlords could afford to be a lot less picky about who they rent to. Brokers or other middlemen also benefit the landlord by keeping the landlord at arms length from tenant selection and therefore possible discrimination lawsuits.
Yup, also banned in England now. It shouldn't have been, but it was very refreshing when I last renewed my lease not to be charged several hundred pounds for the privilege of emailing back a signed copy of the document with the end date changed.
It was a state law that capped application fees at $20 or something, and some authority interpreted that as broker's could no longer charge fees to tenants, but then the real estate brokers association was granted a stay + the court eventually decided in their favor.
It's good that there's no surprise fees, but they're still being paid. It's like anything, the value is just hidden in the price of the product now, rent in this case.
That's not how anything works. The money doesn't just come from nowhere, or from the landlord's profits. It is accounted for as an increase to rent. That's what I meant by "surprise fees", you're still paying them, they're just not a surprise anymore. Maybe the increased transparency in the market will push out brokers that aren't adding value, but that's more of a hope.
It's not a hope, it's reality in other countries, like the UK.
We banned letting agent fees charged to the tenant. Miraculously, landlords didn't find paying £250 for a contract renewal value for money.
Rents continue to go up and down, but now tenants know they are spending money on their flat or house, rather than paying inflated fees to a letting agent/broker.
If the landlord pays a fee equal to a percentage of the rent you will be paying them if you rent there. If they are pervasively popular in your market you wont have much choice but to pay them as well.
Not quite; some of this is about moving wealth around, changing the captured value to favor the buyer instead of the seller.
But that’s just the “efficient market” part of this. A fee like this could very well be an inefficient rent-capture that has managed to make its removal more expensive in the short-term than the short-term cost of allowing it to remain. Said less charitably, it’s a racket.
I would have thought that on HN of all places, where so many folks are attempting “disruption” (ie finding these unnecessary market inefficiencies and stepping around their cultural/legal/systemic barriers in order to reap some of the otherwise captured value), this would be better understood.
lol - one way or another the buyer is paying for it. If sellers operate at a loss for too long, they won't have that thing to sell any more :p
Overhead is overhead. Trying to pretty it up with fancy language like "moving wealth around" and "changing captured value" doesn't alter the fundamental economics.
This is correct in almost all cases (outside of highly commoditized goods) and it's crazy how people don't understand it. It's why the price of McDonalds doesn't increase when minimum wage does. McDonalds is already charging as much as they can for a Big Mac (where stores averages a 40% margin). Increasing minimum wage means that margin goes down a bit, not that prices increase. If they could increase prices they already would have.
McDonalds is a bit of an outlier here; they have incredibly predictable food costs due to high levels of standardization and a worldwide inventory network. The franchisees have a certain amount of leeway on pricing, some of which is dictated at the corporate level down, but it's based on bona fide expenses.
If local regulatory conditions cause your labor cost to go up, they are absolutely allowed to (and will) raise prices to compensate.
> This is correct in almost all cases (outside of highly commoditized goods) and it's crazy how people don't understand it.
What are you on about? Of course McD will change prices relative to input expenditure. You can even see this across all the countries they serve. If there were to be a significant impact on margin, they can increase prices.
All fees are passed onto customers, that’s how you calculate profit margins.
Most business only absorb the minimum amount of margin loss they can, and for very short terms. No business aims to operate at a loss unless propped up by outside investments.
All businesses will increase prices to maintain the profits they need, up until what the market will bear - which is why taxes will also not end up pushing it too far, the gov isn’t stupid.
Again, it depends on elasticities. Businesses can't just raise prices and expect demand to remain at old levels. People quickly substitute goods and services in the face of price changes. In the case of mcdonalds price increases cause people to cook or eat food that doesn't need to be prepared. In the case of rent, supply is fixed, so landlords are already charging monopoly prices. There is very close to zero wiggle room for landlords to raise prices.
> This is disproved very easily by reality - most places have increasing rent YoY. Same goes for house prices.
All this proves is that evolving market conditions lead to changes in price. Try charging 2030's market-rate rent in 2021, and see how many offers you get.
Except is does.. and no they do not charge "as much as they can" for the big mac. Prices go up all the time, just in the last year the price of the Big Mac has increased a lot due to input costs, including labor, going up
> Thinking that labor costs do not impact product costs is grossly ignorant.
No one is arguing that labor cost doesn't impact product cost, but the fact is that in general it doesn't impact product price.
Or to put it the other way: can you imagine a business not increasing product price as much as they can, regardless of the product cost, as long as the supply is matched?
If they can increase the price, why would they wait for cost to rise before doing so?
The outcome is that business/landlord already charge as much as they can, and increased cost doesn't change the product price, since they already chareg as much as they can.
You seem to be missing the fundmental problem here
Sure not all prices are infinitely elastic, but if Labor costs out strip the ability to prices to absorb them that do not mean the business simply magically makes them go away, no that business goes bankrupt and wages go to $0.
Owners / Investors demand a return on investment, if the market average is 8%, and business x is only returning 4% why would an investor continue to keep their capital there?
Worse still if inflation is 3% and the business is only returning 2% the investor is LOSING MONEY by keeping their capital in the business, better to cut their losses and move on
This mythical position where by businesses just "absorb the cost" because the prices are not elastic is pure fantasy
So you just reject the field of economics entirely?
Like, lets say that the government adds a 20$ tax/fee on fast food, per burger sold. Clearly McDonalds would no longer be able to sell burgers for 4 dollars.
Thus price would increase. Or supply of burgers would go down (thereby only leaving higher priced burgers in the market).
Is it though? Airbnb is essentially a rental broker, it charges a high fee, and still hasn't turned an annual profit. Plus the landlords add on "cleaning fees" and more that the tenant must agree to pay.
I don't really get where brokers fit in. Most landlords should have the time/employees to take care of such things themselves. An absentee landlord would need a whole property management service to take care of everything, not just one small part.
Not really. My parents used a broker for their rental. They manage the maintenance and rent collection themselves, but did not have the time or energy to do marketing/showing/vetting of new tenants.
And the broker they used basically does all the listings in the condo complex, so he has a steady flow of interested and vetted renters as well as standard leases that cover the specifics of the condo complex, as well as a relationship with the management office to get the renters approved quickly and get them keys for amenities and such.
In our case we pay the broker, but I can see a lot of value in their services for the landlord.
Do you know how much it would cost to have an actual employee, just to show the apartments and answer questions? You're paying them hourly or salary, plus payroll tax, unemployment, all of the other added expenses that a blue state throws on top of that. Plus liability, you now have to comply with every blue state law- oops did you not give the employee their exact mandated lunch time under California's very complex, tough to parse lunch rules? Get ready for a six to seven figure fine. The employee could always invent a discrimination lawsuit, wrongful termination, claim they were injured on the job, etc.
The broker is an independent third party to whom you pay a fixed fee, and have no extra cost or regulatory liability beyond that. A no brainer
> Most landlords should have the time/employees to take care of such things themselves.
Do they have to have their own fulltime electrician on staff or are they allowed to contract it out? Why the insistence that the work be done by their own employees instead of contractors?
Similar situation in Boston. The value add is that the brokers are regulated and in theory this means no one gets scammed. For context, over the past few years of crazy rental market, many people have gotten scammed by finding a fake listing online, sending off a deposit, and never hearing from the "landlord" again.
It's a huge hassle in Boston as well. Pretty boy hustle brokers deserve easy work that doesn't require real education so I can pay more to find a domicile - said no one ever...
