ABC news reports on a problem that appears to have spread nation-wide—fake broker’s collecting deposits on apartments they don’t represent. The Federal Trade Comission has a press release with some tips to apartment hunters on how to avoid this scam. Cutting to the chase, the FTC says “When you use a bulletin board website, it’s renter beware…”

We are almost embarrassed to point out that OnMarketBoston is NOT a bulletin board. We enter all of our own listings—which are all vetted and verified. No one using OMB has ever been scammed this way, and we’re reasonably sure they never will. Craig, bless his heart and glory be to his accomplishment, can’t promise this on his list. User generated content is great in many ways. This isn’t one of them.

These scams play out a number of ways. Some scammers hijack a bona fide rental or real estate listing by changing the email address or other contact information, and placing the modified ad on another site. The altered ad may use the name of the person who posted the original ad. Other rip-off artists make up listings for places that aren’t for rent or don’t exist, and try to lure you in with the promise of extra low rent. Their goal is to get your money before you find out.

Being savvy when you’re in search of a rental takes some extra effort, but with your money at stake, it’s well worth it. Here are some signs you may be dealing with a scam:

1. They want you to wire money. This is the surest sign of a scam. There’s never a good reason to wire money to pay a security deposit, application fee, or first month’s rent. Wiring money is the same as sending cash — once you send it, you have no way to get it back.
2. They want a security deposit or first month’s rent before you’ve met or signed a lease. It’s never a good idea to send money to someone you’ve never met in person for an apartment you haven’t seen. If you can’t visit an apartment or house yourself, ask someone you trust to go and confirm that it’s for rent. In addition to setting up a meeting, do a search on the landlord and listing. If you find the same ad listed under a different name, that’s a clue it may be a scam.
3. They say they’re out of the country. But they have a plan to get the keys into your hands. It might involve a lawyer or “agent” working on their behalf. Some scammers even create fake keys. Be skeptical, and don’t send money overseas. If you can’t meet in person, see the apartment, or sign a lease before you pay, keep looking.

When you use a bulletin board website, it’s renter beware. But even sites that require additional information like a credit card number can be gamed by scammers. If you find yourself the target of a rental scam, report it to your local law enforcement and also to the FTC at ftc.gov/complaint. Also contact the website where the ad was posted.

The FTC works for the consumer to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices in the marketplace and to provide information to help consumers spot, stop, and avoid them. To file a complaint or to get free information on consumer issues, visit ftc.gov or call toll-free, 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357); TTY: 1-866-653-4261. The FTC enters consumer complaints into the Consumer Sentinel Network, a secure online database and investigative tool used by hundreds of civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad.

Post from: Real Boston Apartments

Price, size, location are the big three criteria. Nobody lives in Boston because it’s affordable or because the rental housing is in great shape. You live here for the stuff outside your apartment; the schools, the night-life, the museums, the clubs, the bars, the jobs, the opportunity.  Once you sign a lease, barring something really crazy and terrible, you’re committed. Check out your prospective apartment and the neighborhood and region thoroughly before you sign on the dotted line. Here’s some stuff to think about.

Location, Location, Location

City life is a trade off between time and money. Want a nice cheap place? Live out on the commuter rail, and take the train in. Want to live where the action is? Where you groggily stumble from your apartment, get a cup of great non-starbucks coffee, jump on the T, read a paperback on your way to work, leave work early, take the T to see the Red Sox, eat some great Thai food, go dancing, stumble home on foot, too drunk to drive, (you drank your cab money), wake up hung over the next day and do it all again? (Actually, if you drink this much check out AA; I’m just flashing back on my 20s.) Want to live, as the Chinese curse goes, an interesting life?

Then live in a city. Here’s some location stuff to consider:

1. Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk. Bars and clubs are cool to live near—but not too near. Be careful about what’s in earshot of your apartment. Listen carefully to street noise when inside your unit, specifically to the sound of trucks hitting potholes. (This drove me nuts for five years) You’re going to get some noise in a city, and you can adapt to a lot, but keep it in mind as you check out various locations. Train tracks can be another issue; if you’re close to one, try to figure out what the schedules are; ask a previous tenant if you can, or a neighbor, what’s it like to live there. If they have been institutionalized, that’s a bad sign. Be careful about airports, and indian burial grounds.
2. Public Transit. Want to use public transit? After the agent shows you a unit, before you sign a lease, time your walk to the nearest T-station (don’t take anyone’s word for it; walk it yourself) Want to sit and read while you take the train to work? Forget the Green-line; think Red, Orange, or Blue. Oh, and the silver line train is a bus. I don’t understand that either. Investigate bus routes and timing carefully if you are far from the T. A bus line may be very close to your new place, but how often does it run? A bus to T-stop commute can take a long time on a rainy day.

Apartment Size, Number of Bedrooms, and Whatnot

By size generally we’re talking about the number of bedrooms, but there are bedrooms and there are bedrooms. Bring a tape measure to make sure you can actually get your bed into a given bedroom. Some are fit only for oompa-loompas. Closets? Well, there aren’t any to speak of in the city. No joke, in the 1500-2000 range expect one tiny closet per bedroom, in the best case scenario. Storage? Hopefully some in a shared basement area; more often, none at all. Check out the basement if they have one. Look for flood lines on the walls.

Think about any common spaces; do they work for you? Do you plan on cooking and eating together? Look for a bigger kitchen. Don’t cook? Go for a tiny galley kitchen and a bigger living room. Is a bathtub important to you, or is a shower stall fine? Think about it. There are significant variations, even within a single managed building, between apartment layouts, and the relative size of bedrooms vs common areas.

Price: Money is time, and vice versa

Factors which will affect price include distance to the T, general unit condition, criminal activity in the area, building / unit amenities. At any given price point and location there is often a degree of uniformity of units in terms of big things (Kitchen and laundry options; average square footage). But beware the occasional suicide unit. These units cost the same as a decent unit, but have a certain dismal quality, a stale smell; worn wall to wall carpeting; bars on the windows, bad light. Often time there are better units available in the same building. On the flip side, there’s the occasional ‘very cool for the price point’ unit. Walking up three flights might net you high ceilings and skylights. Currently, a lot this info isn’t in any database in any meaningful way; we are changing that, but the process takes time. If you haven’t left the apartment hunt to the last second, check a bunch of places if you enjoy the process. If your housing deadline looms, critical, don’t worry about smaller things; stick with a big three decision and avoid the suicide units.

Kids, Kats, and Kars

1. In Love with Your Car?
   Check out what street parking is really like in your area; be aware of the nightmare of street cleaning, when half the parking spots disappear for a single day. Figure out what the deal is with any included off-street parking; doing the two car shuffle in driveways gets old fast, but if you want to live in a detached house and not a hive, that’s par for the course. Ever use a zip car?
2. Where do the children play-ay-ay-ay, ay ay ay.
   This is an entire article in itself. Few people choose to live in a city with kids; or if they do, they intend to get out pretty soon; before school at any rate. Still, if you have a kid, you need to realize that you are going to be spending a lot of your life in the nearest park. So check it out. Seriously, this will be the second or third most important place in your life. Does it have water, sprinklers, in the summer? Is it new, or ancient pressure treated lumber, rusted steel and sand? Who is hanging around? Angry looking teens, or parents you wouldn’t mind being friends with (because to be honest, these are the only people you’re going to be socializing with for the next ten years or so.)

• Getting the lead out. State law says that landlords can’t rent units to families with children under six that have lead paint, and that they cannot discriminate against families with children. Deleading can cost 10 thousand dollars. This creates very complicated situations; what it boils down to is that in the real world, if you have kids,  your apartment search is going to be harder; perhaps much harder, than someone without kids. Perhaps not fair, but true. Our advice; be honest about your children’s ages, and get something already deleaded. There’s some law enforcement effort underway now to improve this situation; lead poisoning is down in the Boston Metro region over the last few decades, but with some of nation’s oldest housing stock, much of it built before 1970, there’s a lot of lead out there.

Dogs and Cats, Living Together: Anarchy
Cats and small dogs are one category of pets; large dogs another; chimps and anacondas another. This is one of those non-negotiables for a lot of people. This means you need to be up front about this in your apartment search.

Here’s a list of suggestions to make it work:

• Provide your landlord with positive written statements from former landlords about your pet’s behaviour and verify that your rental unit was in good shape when you moved out.
• Create a “pet resume” This is a nicely formatted document containing pictures, references, vet contact, vaccination records, obedience training instructor name, etc. This sounds nuts, but some people say it works.
• Invite your landlord to meet your pet. Consider wine, cheese, candlelight.
• Offer the landlord a ‘pet deposit.’ (Don’t allow your pet to make a deposit while sitting on the landlords lap, though.)
• If necessary, say you will agree in writing to pay for any unit damage caused by your pet.
• Don’t conceal your pet status. An individual landlord, (or a landlord with a few units )landlord might be amenable to changing their mind on a pet; a managed property with rules carved in stone 99% of the time simply can’t. But it never hurts to ask.
• Be prepared to pay extra rent for larger dogs. (I’ve seen a few landlords say they do this. If this has happened to you, please comment on this article, I’m curious how often it really happens.)

We’re going to keep adding to this article, and turn it  into its own top level page. If you have any comments, or tips of your own, please feel free to give them.

Post from: Real Boston Apartments

The short answer to this question is yes.

A slightly longer answer would be, hell yes.

The third answer is, which isn’t an answer but just another comment I want to make, is that appeals to reason are a bad strategy for coping with a brand disaster. Developers often make the mistake of assuming that other people are as rational as they are. This is why most companies use user interface consultants and marketing and PR people—because developers don’t think like users and customers.

Back to the safety thing. The recent unpleasantness on CL is something we at OMB could try to exploit. (Use OnMarketBoston—certified 100% murder free!) But we won’t, because that would be wrong. Like shouting fire a crowded movie house. Like fear-mongering about a flu epidemic.

Things that Craigslist, any section, (including the recently discontinued serial killer dating forum), is safer than:

1. Driving a car.
2. Walking.
3. Bathing.
4. Golfing.
5. Swimming.
6. Eating.
7. Not eating.

We’re hoping the folks at CL hire some PR and marketing types, pronto, to advise them on how to get out of this mess, because Craigslist is on the whole a good thing, for more than a simple majority of users, but for most users.

But this is the point of this article; the reason OnMarketBoston can never have this kind of problem is, our content isn’t user-generated. OnMarketBoston is a walled garden. Sometimes walled gardens are the best answer to certain problems on the web; sometimes they’re a disaster. Boston’s unique real-estate market makes our system work; the fact that a handful of agencies have access to 95% of the public listings in the metro region means that end users are well served by our site.

We stand by our business model. It makes OnMarketBoston, as the expression goes, safe as houses. Even safer than the already safe-enough Craigslist. Plus, zero redundancy, third-party certified.

Post from: Real Boston Apartments

Cigarettes and Scratch tickets are sold together at every convenience store in America. Because people want them. They want them both at the same time. Buying a one in two chance of painful death by cancer, and, a one in a 27 kabillion chance of making some unearned cash.

Why? Because people think they’re lucky.

Here’s the thing; people aren’t. When you do stupid stuff, generally, your life sucks. How does this relate to apartment hunting? Well, people trust what they see on the web. I’ll mention again, the agency website where every listing was updated at 9:00 am that morning. Every single one. Now, if you search for a few places, and you see the fake time stamp, you think, “WHEW! Lucky me, the one I want was JUST UPDATED!—I”m gonna give these guys a call RIGHT NOW!”

They paw through the rummage sale at Craigslist, until they notice that they are seeing the same units over and over again, with slightly different photos; or the same photo, and they shrug and give someone a call.

We’re here to tell you you can do better. A martial arts or exercise class  is a better investment than the coffin nails and the scratch tickets. You’ll feel better if you go that way. And you should start, and end, your apartment search at www.onmarketboston.com, where the listings are real. We understand you might want to step out, check out other sites, but come back to us before making your call, after you figure out that the whole system makes as much sense as the scratch tickets and the cigarettes.

We’re giving away the truth at OMB. And you are special. You’re reading this. You’re smart. You can figure this stuff out. We can help.

Be awake. Be here now. Live where you want to. It’s up to you.

Post from: Real Boston Apartments

We’re a small company, and we’re narrowly focused, because this is what we have the resources to do. (For now.) But we’re part of a global movement trying to do this everywhere. Honestly, we’re trying to make a living, and make the world a better place, at the same time. Maybe just a little bit better. But it’s worth supporting, if you like having access to information.

We used to ask people to use the ‘add this’ thingy, to bookmark us on social media sites. This doesn’t work for some reason. It would be nice, though. So we’re still asking.

Now we’re asking you to do a survey. It’s short, it’s a bit of a push-poll, but we are asking these questions for a reason; we can use this information to build our network, and we will share this information with you at OnMarketBoston. It’s a win win thing; I know that sounds 90s, but it’s the truth.

So please do the survey. Please. I’m kinda begging you. I want to see if begging works. Maybe another survey will cover that. If people do this one.

Do your bit for transparency, for real information on the web. We’re not asking for money; we’re not PBS. We’re asking you to use our free website, bookmark us, and now, the surveys. If you do one of these things, we’re happy. Two or three, and honestly, we should buy you some coffee someday. If we get this thing working, we will. Coffee day—coming soon.

We’re thinking big over here.

Post from: Real Boston Apartments

Yup, that’s the new marketing phrase. Because we Got Real. We type it in, those real on market properties, normalize that data,  geocode it, verify it; if a mistake slips in, our network of agencies calls us and makes us fix it, lickity split. (I’ve never typed the words ‘lickity split’ before. Sorry you had to read them.)

Our business model is catching on. Well, a few guys copied it off our website and started  competing businesses, at any rate. Imitation is the sincerest form of the flattery, so what can we say. We’re flattered! Our clients are sticking with us, as they’ve seen us grow through the years. Making stuff; fixing stuff; answering the phone.

It hasn’t been easy, because we have something that nobody else has, and we’ve had to fight for it. OnMarketBoston, our apartment hunting portal. Proving the value, to our agency partners, of a different way of handling the aggregate portal—getting rid of the redundancy—has been a struggle. Why?

Because everyone else just prints more listings. More is better! Even more—betterer! In cyberspace there are no limits based on physical reality! Everyone gets as many listings as they want! Take a look at Craigslist, or Boston Apartments—zillions of listings! Zillions and zillions and zillions! Wheeee!

You know what, though? There’s still the same number of real, on-market properties. So you know what all those  redundant listings are to you, the apartment hunter?

Can you say—a waste of time? We knew  you could, and we knew you would, if we explained how this worked. But we have to get your attention. I like using photoshop to make fake billboards which we might put up if all our money didn’t go into making those fresh tasty listings. (see above.) I write weird marketing poetry and put it on flyers. It’s fun, and when people read it, it serves a purpose. Spreading the gospel of Real.

So we’re celebrating our reality by walking the city, talking to vendors and coffeeshop owners and barkeeps, taking photos and slapping up flyers, talking to agency owners, brokers, agents, students, citizens, and probably the occasional zombie or android.

Because everybody has to live someplace, and not everybody should  be buying a house. Renting is beautiful. Just ask someone with an upside down mortgage. Just ask a parent who accidentally bought in the wrong neighborhood and who doesn’t have money for a private school.

Keep your options open; your ear to the ground, your nose to the grindstone, your head in the clouds, and your feet, well, I guess they go with your ears on the ground. The rumble you hear is the sound of change, boiling up from the center of the earth, getting ready to sweep away the status quo. Lickity split. Some of the changes will be bad, some good.

We’re one of the good changes. Real apartments on the web. Not classified ads—think inventory. Live inventory. For the places you want to live.

Post from: Real Boston Apartments

Rents are down throughout New York. According to the February Manhattan Rental Market Report produced by the Real Estate Group, a New York brokerage firm, rents in the borough have fallen “across the board.” The biggest drop was in studio apartments in doorman buildings, which have fallen 8.33 percent from the same time last year.

Some facts gleaned from the article which may have significance in our market as the forces at work in the economy continue to alter the rental landscape:

1. Broker Fees shift towards the property owner. (sometimes a split between owner and renter, sometimes purely paid by the owner.)
2. Rather than officially lower rents, many landlords give away a free month or two of rent when signing a lease. I guess this lets everyone pretend rents are falling to try to prop up the market. (Foolish humans.)
3. Renegotiating rents with your current landlord may not work; you may be better off moving to save money. (Landlords may not be willing to admit how much times have changed.)
4. Credit scores become less important to some landlords desperate for tenants.
5. Renters often ‘trade up’ at the same price point, into better places in more desirable locations.

NYC may be a special case; it is obviously suffering hugely from the financial meltdown as many of the lost jobs in that industry were concentrated in that region. At any rate, we do not expect to see another year of increasing rents in the Boston Metro Region.

“We know we’re still sitting on a bubble,” said a worried Realtor to me the other day. “Everyone knows it. The only question is, when does it pop, and how far does it fall?”

She was speaking about the home sales market, of course, and dislocations there can have the perverse effecct of temporarily increasing rents as housing stock sits empty while stubborn property owners refuse to take a haircut. So nothing is cut and dried here, in the short term. We’re thinking that dropping rents will be a good sign that the crisis in the housing industry is working it’s way through the economy as owners and property managers adapt to the new environment.

Post from: Real Boston Apartments

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Post from: Real Boston Apartments

Previous studies which seemed to confer a host of benefits on home owning may have confused correlation with causation, incorrectly controlling for a variety of variables including marital status and income level. (Home owners may not be happier because they own homes—they  may be happier just because they’re richer. They’d be happy renters, too.)

And if that isn’t enough to make you reconsider renting versus owning, read this from a recent piece in the Boston Globe.

A recent study, which aimed to avoid the problems of previous research, suggests that homeownership confers no real benefits. The study examined self-respect, perceived notions of control, time spent with friends and family, volunteer activities, and enjoyment of the neighborhood, among other things. On all of these measures, after controlling for income, health status, and home value, the study found no significant advantage for homeowners. In fact, homeowners were on average 12 pounds heavier, and they spent less time with friends. They also reported more “pain” - the term used in the study’s survey - deriving from their homes than renters.

The downsides here all jibe with my own personal experience. So if you’re a renter who used to envy your home-owning aquaintances, remember to enjoy your friendships, admire your waistline, and bask in the Schadenfreude. You’ve earned it.

Post from: Real Boston Apartments

Post from: Real Boston Apartments