Just had to do this a few weeks ago. They have you taken a pic of your driver's license, provide your SSN & run a credit check on the spot. Then they charge you to tour the place.

A very "fuck you, I'm getting paid regardless" mentality from rental companies.

What the actual fuck

Rents are too high for a single income to cover anymore, so I’ve been looking for roommates. Even the websites about finding roommates expect you to pay.

To be clear, they have a free tier - but unless you pay, you can’t read the messages you receive. You can read the first line, but the rest is locked. I gave up with one place because the boomer trying to rent a room refused to send me an email. I told him three times to please just email me his message because I couldn’t read it on the site, but because he could read messages fine, he thought it was a setting he had to change. He kept responding with “Okay try now” and didn’t seem to understand that he can’t “settings” other people out from behind a paywall.

All he had to do was copy/paste his message and send it a different way, but he wouldn’t do it. I eventually gave up because the thought of living with someone that’s unable to follow such simple directions sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.

Anyway, point is, even if you’re so poor that you need to seek out roommates, you’re still expected to pay a subscription. I don’t even know what to do anymore.

Just people making passive income guys, nothing to see here.

We once heard of a service that would help us find a rental house. So we went there, had to pay for an appointment. Turns out they do nothing you cannot do yourself, and you pay a lot. They literally just put you in the system, which you can do yourself, and when you get a house through that system, which is free and from the government, they make you pay through the nose for that house.

Of course, since I am native in this country I have no need for a service like that. Turns out they mostly do this to people who don't speak the language. I guess they offer a service, but their fees are excessive for what they do. They abuse the fact those people don't know any better.

There's lots of people making a profit from somebody else's house finding misery and I hate it.

This has gotta be some NYC shit

Do the unlimited and have constant tours for all 30 days. Get friends to individually do the same. Pester the ever living fuck out of them.

Why would they sell/rent when they make so much money on tours?

See, you pay us for the privilege of being considered as a candidate to pay us.

agencies: "housing is just not unaffordable enough. I wonder what else we can do to contribute?"

Nobody tell OP about rental application fees, they'll explode.

This is why I'll boondock until its completely illegal. Then if they don't force me into the gray pod then I'm going feral hobo until I die in a fight with a racoon over some berries.

I want to shit down the neck stump of whoever came up with this

So, I think a decade or so ago (maybe more), the bigger corpos went full mask off, and stopped even pretending they cared about anything but making more money. Screw the employees, screw the customer, screw the regulatory departments. Money only.

It seems this is filtering down to more and more businesses.

I am not sure how it is over there. Here in the UK the number of rental properties has dropped drastically. I suspect, it's because of a few changes legally here that make it not quite so lucrative to buy-to-let any more. In any case, rather than bring house prices down, it just made the rentals still on the market go up in price. As an example today for my postcode there are over 80 properties for sale (excluding retirement/shared properties) and only around 10 for rent with the same filters. It used to be closer to half the number of rental properties up until around 5 or so years ago.

If there's a seller's (well landlord's/renter's I guess) market, they could for sure make people pay to get an edge on gaining an increasingly rare rental. It's downright scummy. But, I expect nothing less any more.

In some cases, arson is morally perfectly justifiable.

Why do we even need people to show us apartments. My best experience when looking for a my last apartment was a place that had a automated system, you scan your drivers license for verification, their app gives you the address and the time to visit, when you get there it gives you a lockbox code that will contain the keys to the apartment, you check the apartment out and return the keys to the lockbox on your way out, this should be the default for every rental apartment visit. Every agent I had to deal with was less than useful, this industry needs to die.

Well I need the 24/7 phone and chat support. What if I have a question about my ability to tour a property at 2am?