Category: Renting Safely

When I used to show apartments I would have a loose script and staging that I would fall back to. At the end of every showing (and frequently after showing each room) I would pause and ask if the clients had any questions. Most of the time they would say nothing, so I'd move on.

In many cases when I was representing the landlord I would have had any number of questions in the back of my head that they really should have asked. I would gloss over things and fail to point out glaring weaknesses. They would not say anything. (I'm ashamed to admit one particular showing where I spent the entire time rooted in one place in the kitchen to "let the client explore and get a feel for the place." My foot was hiding a dead mouse that I had spotted on the way in and there was no way I was moving from that spot.) Continue reading Questions to ask your next Landlord about Applications and Fees

There's been a lot of talk about background checks lately. The topic tends to come up every time people are scared by recent violence and want some way of ensuring that Bad Things continue to happen only in far away places.

Over the course of my real estate career I had to run lots and lots of background checks on renters. I saw the background check output from 20-30 different tenant screening companies. They ranged in thoroughness from just a yes-no decision to 60 pages of detailed, computerized data. Only a handful of them provided a real, accurate picture of the tenants. The process that RentConfident uses to check on landlords in Chicago was designed in part as a response to the problems I found with modern tenant screening methods.

Civilian rental screening is far removed from the intensive processes used to monitor emigrés who are following legal entry channels. However, there are many others who get into the country through other means, both legal (student and worker visas) and not. It has been repeatedly proven by comparing prison populations and census data that foreign born residents of the US commit far fewer serious crimes than their US-born counterparts. Given the uneven treatment of immigrants and the high number of domestic criminals, those who are concerned about screening would do well to focus not only on the treatment of newcomers but also the vetting processes that are used to restrict who has access to our homes and offices on a daily basis.

Fortunately, landlords have options to screen their renters. Many landlords will even use their "thorough screening" of renters as an advertising hook, implying that their buildings are safer than the rest. This, my friends, is a load of baloney.
Continue reading A Screen is Only as Strong as its Largest Hole.

When I worked as a Realtor the "pro-agency" party line was very clearly imposed as a restriction on my writing. While I was able to blog about a lot of different real estate-related topics, I was never able to expressly say to any client that they would be better off searching without an agent's help.

There were many times when I wished that particular restriction was not in place. Now that I'm no longer an agent, it isn't there anymore, so I'm gonna say it: sometimes agents are going to do more harm than good in your rental search. Continue reading 10 Situations Where Rental Agents Can Make Apartment Hunting Worse

So I've been working on a research project involving Yelp and Chicago landlords. It'll be a few weeks before I have the final results, but I wanted to take a moment to discuss one early piece of data I've already discovered. There's one particular word that landlords and tenants both use, but with completely different definitions. The conflicting use of that word is at the core of nearly 40% of Yelp complaints against landlords, property managers and their ilk. Continue reading Failure to Communicate