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Bidding Website Rentberry May Be the Startup of Your Nightmares (gizmodo.com)
Renting is already fraught with pain, from annual rent hikes to extortionate lettings fees. But if a new service called Rentberry takes off, it could be about to get a lot worse. From a report: Rentberry has been operating in test cities and angering affordable housing advocates since 2016. But with its new expansion into 1,000 cities in the United States, the rental bidding website is about to piss off a lot more people. Alex Lubinksy, founder of Rentberry, seems to be pursuing an image that's closer to Uber's vilified Travis Kalanick than the do-gooder model of Elon Musk. Lubinsky courts the controversy that surrounds his startup and is known to include negative press when communicating his vision to reporters. But one big difference with Rentberry will be that if it takes off and becomes the new standard for renting apartments, most of its customers won't be able to run a #deleteRentberry campaign because landlords will have the control. The website essentially functions as a cross between CraigsList and eBay. A landlord lists a rental space and potential tenants bid against one another to claim the lease. Tenants' personal information is available to the landlord. The landlord then makes their final decision by weighing what the best offer is along with which bidder seems like they'd be the best tenant. For now, Rentberry charges users a $25 fee, but in the future, it plans to charge 25 percent of the difference between the asking price and the agreed upon rent. Whoever received the better deal pays the fee -- every month.
was suppose to make the world a better place? So far all I'm seeing is crap like this and Fake News. It's not lookin' good.
Oh, and you know, we could just ban stuff like this. I'm just saying...
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Rather than allowing the economy to send out signals about what is wanted and needed, zoning regulations, building regulations, renting regulations, mortgage rate manipulations, lending quotas, etc., all distort those signals until nobody knows what's going on.
The outcome of such confusion is obvious: Resources get allocated poorly, producing too much of what the economy doesn't need, and too little of what the economy does need. And, when the whole thing comes crashing down, the fools who crafted the errant "policy" suggest that the problem was not enough "policy" in the first place.
Please, allow people to pursue their happiness (read: pursue their self interest); it is in your best interest to live within a society that runs smoothly.
It matches supply with demand. If rents are too high the root problem is there isn't enough housing being built. All of this yelling about "greed" and "rent control" and even worse -- high minimum wage -- are just bandaids that won't solve the root of the problem.
So politicians get to "champion the little guy" with ineffective measures while enjoying their large lots for their own housing and collecting expensive property taxes. But woe be you if you're a developer seeking to build more housing units. Fees and permits alone will scare away all but the most determined (and profit seeking).
Only on slashdot are we presented with an example of a startup giving complete control of rental housing pricing to the renters, and then told that this is evil. As a renter who has lived at both ends of the spectrum, I almost impaled my face with my own palm when reading this story.
Because the properties list their rates before hand and are already pricing based on demand. You dont have to outbid somebody else for it.
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NYC has a lot of residential units. problem is young kids want to live in a few trendy neighborhoods and then complain about the rents
So if my city comes and wants to change the park next to me to a smelter plant, that is in their best interest so I shouldn't have a problem with it?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"rent-seeking" usually refers to entities that benefit from government mandates. This is not the case here.
Typically yes, but it is not solely from government sources. From wikipedia: "Rent-seeking implies extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity." Basically any type of middle-man arrangement with no real added value is rent seeking. In fact, this is worse than a middle man if you consider their long-term goal of charging off of the difference (either way) from the original asking price: their ideal situation is one is which one party gets a decidedly sub-optimal outcome, thereby creating negative value.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Is that landlords have access to bidders personal information, and that the landlord gets to "choose" among the bidders who actually gets to rent the property, regardless of their offers. The article compares the service to ebay, but a key difference is that on ebay the highest bidder always gets the item, provided they can actually pay up. By putting that power instead in the hands of the landlords, the company is really shooting themselves in the foot. Some landlord somewhere will eventually turn down a higher bid from a black/latino/etc potential tenant in favor of a white one, or a male tenant instead of a female one or vice versa, etc etc. Then both the landlord and the company will be buried up to their eyeballs in litigation from every conceivable direction.
Hey, if you want to maintain your view of the beach ... join together with your neighborhoods to purchase that property, and maintain it as you see fit—and pool your resources together to fend off that violently imposed monopoly (something something eminent domain).
I did join together with my neighbors to purchase the property. It's called being a citizen and paying taxes.
Oh, wait, did you mean to pool together with such a small group that we could be easily overruled by a corporation?
Nope, no sig
Well, at some point, a city is a finite resource, and it sounds like NYC is about full, and people need to look elsewhere perhaps, to live?
Sure, everyone has a right to live wherever they want, but they don't necessarily have a right to "afford" to live wherever they want.
Everything in life has a price.
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Resources get allocated poorly, producing too much of what the economy doesn't need, and too little of what the economy does need.
"The economy" doesn't need shit. It's people who need things.
Nope, no sig
There are reasons that rental laws are biased against landlords. Most landlords aren't living in a duplex right next to their tenant -- that's simply not the case for 99.99% of the properties out there. Most landlords, in fact, own and operate several properties nowhere near their actual place of residence. What they are selling is a roof over the head of another individual or family.
So, in a situation where a tenant loses the ability to pay rent, it stands to reason that the landlord shouldn't be able evict that tenant immediately. Yeah, that has unfortunately lead to a black market for squatters, but it also serves its purpose as a firewall against aggressive landlords who would put a family on the street just as soon as the first payment was missed.
Pay a fee every month? yeah that guarantees that it will not become the standard.
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