New Yorkers: help me defeat the evil NYC real estate market (rentenforcer.com)
I am an NYC based hacker who has had enough of dealing with the horrible process of finding and getting an apartment. One of the major issues you have is that you can only trust what the broker tells you to be true, ie "trust me, this is a good deal."
I have a solution: collect the rents of people in the city, and get a general idea of how yours compares (or how much you should be paying for a neighborhood if you are planning on moving).
Right now the app is very simple: it's just collecting data. Ultimately I'm not 100% sure how I'd use the data, but it would likely be open/free via an API etc. on top of my product. One vision I have is something like a Yelp.com but for real estate.
I am open to your ideas, and I'd love to get any feedback about the idea you have (I know the site itself isn't much). If you are a New Yorker, I'd really appreciate if you could take 30 seconds and fill out the form.
Thanks! NYC RentEnforcer
44 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadI am an NYC based hacker who has had enough of dealing with the horrible process of finding and getting an apartment. One of the major issues you have is that you can only trust what the broker tells you to be true, ie "trust me, this is a good deal."
I have a solution: collect the rents of people in the city, and get a general idea of how yours compares (or how much you should be paying for a neighborhood if you are planning on moving).
Right now the app is very simple: it's just collecting data. Ultimately I'm not 100% sure how I'd use the data, but it would likely be open/free via an API etc. on top of my product. One vision I have is something like a Yelp.com but for real estate.
I am open to your ideas, and I'd love to get any feedback about the idea you have (I know the site itself isn't much). If you are a New Yorker, I'd really appreciate if you could take 30 seconds and fill out the form.
Thanks! NYC RentEnforcer
//edit: On your amenities list, you might want to add a field for duplex apartments.
Maybe examples for different addresses, or average data per neighborhood? I recently was looking for a new apartment, and I found this very useful: http://www.tregny.com/manhattan_rental_market_report
My next step is to figure out exactly how to use the data. I will likely start with neighborhood pages, and move on to individual building pages once the data gets dense enough.
But I would love to hear your thoughts on product ideas - what info would you like to see? What comparisons/analytics on the data you know I have?
Thanks a lot for the feedback! RentEnforcer
Apartment prices depend on the move-in date - an apartment may be rented at significantly less than its current market value if the tenant has been there for 10 years, while someone who just moved in to the identical floorplan will be paying quite a bit more. Comparing this smattering of prices is unhelpful, and is exactly why rental reports like the one linked above are based on average and median prices for apartments currently on the market or recently rented.
The most attractively priced apartments advertised on CL are on there because they are great deals. There are thousands of people looking for the cheapest apartments, and when someone rents it, that means 999 other people get to hear "I'm sorry, that apartment is gone." Obviously I understand the frustration, since I've been on both sides of those conversations, and there are some brokerages that put out shady ads, but nearly all rentals are on the market less than a week, and smart landlords price their apartments so well they are rented within a day - just because apartments get rented is not evidence of a mass conspiracy.
- brokers and rental companies ALWAYS post in the "by owner" section. I've had agents from Citiapartments actually pretend to be the "owner!"
- brokers post in the "no fee" section but there are always fees.
- no photos... because everything that's a decent deal is also a dump.
- "Net Effective" rent prices in the listing. It's listed at $1700 but that's the "Net Effective" rent not taking into account your 2 months free after 14 months and waiving the fee we didn't tell you about which means that you're really sending us a check for $2150 every month but really, trust us, it's only $1700.
Not having pictures is directly related to how fast apartments are rented - sometimes it's simply not reasonable or possible to gain access and go take pictures of an apartment before it is rented.
Net effective is slimy, but not prohibited, as long as it's labeled properly.
For what it's worth, I never advertise without photos and have never used net effective prices, which is my personal decision, but it still bothers me when people extrapolate from a few bad ads or ads they think are misleading and then disparage the entire industry. The real CL scams are much worse than what people are typically paranoid about real estate agents doing behind the scenes.
As far as I can tell, almost every price listed by a management company for an apartment in a new development is "net effective," whether they list it as such or not.
> As far as I can tell, almost every price listed by a management company for an apartment in a new development is "net effective," whether they list it as such or not.
You're right - new developments and management companies are the ones who thrive on advertising net effective prices. They are not officially "brokers," so they are not held to the same guidelines and restrictions that brokers are, and they operate in an uncomfortable gray area when it comes to advertising on CL.
You'll soon face spam issues though. what's your spam strategy?
Beyond that, didn't like the fact that I provided data and got a "no data available" page. I understand your building up the dbase, but it didn't leave me with a great feeling (not a biggie). Perhaps you could show me some data for close by areas so at least as a user, I feel like I benefited somewhat.
On amenities, would add -- Doorman building
At some point, you could perhaps mash up data you get about buildings with a lot of the data NYC has opened up about the city as part of its gov2.0 efforts. This way, you can provide a sense for the "value" of an apartment alongside stats like average income of neighborhood, crime rates, etc.
But of course, building up your dbase is priority one. Good luck.
Already got some heavy competition in that area: http://nyc.everyblock.com/ http://streeteasy.com/nyc http://www.trulia.com/
It would be nice to be able to put in neighborhoods instead of street + zip. E.g., "Upper West Side."
I haven't tried to use it but what I've read in the comments here you also ask for email address.
Confidential, maybe. Anonymous, unlikely.
I don't log any data other than the date besides what you put in the fields. I also don't connect the email address to the listing, it just goes onto a mailing list.
For now it is confidential, though I'm not sure how to reconcile the idea of an API with confidentiality - even when anonymity is involved. Perhaps I should just change it to 100% anonymous?
Does that message even need to be there? Is anyone concerned with it? Might be be better to put the message at the bottom instead. Those who care will look for a statement like that and others won't be distracted.
http://nyc.rentenforcer.com/
then one day you can grow, ie:
chicago.rentenforcer.com
boston.rentenforcer.com
etc.
for now you can map www. to nyc. to keep inbound links