

Freakonomics: How to Avoid a Bad Apartment in New York City - cwan
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/how-to-avoid-a-bad-apartment-in-new-york-city/

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btucker
Here's an approach I've always wanted to try, but never had the opportunity:

If the apartment is currently occupied, write a brief informal note telling
the tenant you're considering their apartment and would they send you a brief
honest review of how their time there has been. Include a SASE & an email
address. Address it by hand to Current Resident, and drop it in a mailbox. You
could even include a $5 gift card to starbucks or something. Seems you would
have a pretty good chance at a thoughtful response & it's a lot less invasive
than just going up and knocking on their door.

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mason55
The problem with this, at least in NYC, is that apartments go so quickly.
There's no way a good apartment will be available long enough for this to get
back to you.

~~~
pavel_lishin
You could leave an e-mail address, as well.

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leelin
I realize people are more motivated to complain than praise, but with the
universe of apartments being so vast, they need a LOT of datapoints before the
complement of a black list (all apartments with no complaints) becomes close
to a decent whitelist (apartments that are likely to be good).

Imagine a site called One-Star-Yelp.com, a subset of Yelp that only has
reviews which scored 1-star ratings. The only reason you would visit is for
entertainment value, not to look for tips on where you will dine tonight.

Maybe the best solution is to log all 311 calls (NYC's complaint hotline), and
then let entrepreneurs freely mine the data to be put to good use.

[EDIT: I see now the massive value of steering people to non-crappy, but I
think a blacklist would be far too hard to construct to be valuable vs. a
whitelist]

~~~
maxawaytoolong
In New York most people on a realistic budget have no choice but to settle for
a non-crappy apartment. Often times what looks like a deal, or even just
affordable, is priced that way for a reason: it has bedbugs, it's right above
a bar, it's right below the J train, someone just was murdered in it, etc.
It's actually pretty useful to have a registry of what truly sucks so you
don't waste your time.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> someone just was murdered in it

I never understood why this icked someone out (unless they were murdered by a
random drive-by - that indicates a local crime problem).

I'd LOVE to find a place that wasn't renting because someone died in it - I
wouldn't care in the least, and the rent would be low.

~~~
jrockway
Same. Properly cleaned, what do I care. One day, I am going to die in my
apartment, too.

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pdx
As somebody who has been a renter and a landlord, I feel like there will be a
strong incentive for renters to either exaggerate an apartments problems, or
outright lie. If your landlord is evicting you due to noise, late rent, etc.,
many people's natural instinct is to "get back at him" and this provides a
zero risk way to do that.

~~~
praptak
Even assuming that many tenants will lie, you can ask the landlord or the
broker. Now it gives them a harder choice: instead of _not telling_ you they
have to _lie_. Quite an improvement, IMHO.

Also, many things can be checked even without asking if you know what to look
for.

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dinedal
I'm floored that Steve doesn't realize people love to complain, and that
giving people an outlet to moan about their bad apartment is all the incentive
they need.

~~~
nostrademons
Problem is that this skews the data, since people who post are self-selected
to be people with negative experiences. There're a bunch of apartment review
sites out there already; I looked at a bunch when I moved out here. The
reviews are almost uniformly negative, because the only people who contribute
are the ones that like to complain.

If you want to remove the information asymmetry, you need a random sample of
previous tenants. This is hard to get unless you force people to write reviews
or provide some incentive that is stronger than their urge to complain.

~~~
achompas
Reviews for lots of online products have bimodal distributions: you get tons
of 5-stars and tons of 1-stars.

But that's not the point with this site. As an apartment hunter (probably from
another city or state), you have little information on structural problems
with the apartment. How can you find out if your 1st-floor apartment floods or
lacks concrete foundation? Your realtor or landlord probably won't tell you
the truth.

So, instead, you can turn to former tenants. This site isn't a review data
aggregator--it's a tool for reaching informational equilibrium.

~~~
moultano
>you get tons of 5-stars and tons of 1-stars.

This is entirely explained by game theory. If you think the final star rating
for something should be something other than what the average currently is,
you maximize your power over the rating by using only 1 or 5 star ratings.

~~~
achompas
That's assuming reviewers only derive utility from some product's star rating
and not from voicing their opinion. If it were solely game theory, we'd see
tons of 1- and 5-star reviews with only one or two lines of text (as this
would maximize utility while minimizing the time cost of reviewing). For
websites with more affluent user bases, (Yelp, Amazon's non-video game
products), that's not the case: there are some epic screeds for and against
restaurants and coffee tables.

To me, it looks like a self-selection issue: people only review a product if
it either (a) changes their life positively, or (b) causes them trouble. If a
product only impacts someone's life in a trivial way, well, why write a 3-star
review for a trivially good product?

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pavel_lishin
As someone who's looking to move to New York in about a month, I'm hoping
their site picks up pretty quick.

Also, hoping they expand into other areas; no reason to limit this to NYC.
I've got a couple of places in Dallas I'd gladly register to bitch about.

~~~
daeken
I'm also looking to move to NYC in about a month. Have you spent much time
exploring the neighborhoods? I'm heading out there in about two weeks to do
so, but I've been looking at a lot of places on Craigslist and asking people
for their opinions on different areas to get an idea of what I'm getting into.
Happen to be looking at any specific area?

~~~
m0nastic
I'm also moving to NYC in about a month. My girlfriend and I went up a little
bit ago to check out neighborhoods.

It really depends on what you are looking for. We stayed in Williamsburg for
the duration of our trip (about 5 days) to get a feel for it, as lots of
people recommended it. It turns out we didn't really like it (nothing bad per
se, just not what we're looking for).

We settled on Lower East Side, as it best represents what we're looking for.

To handle the issue of apartment hunting while not living there, we're going
to end up just using airbnb to find a monthly rental, move our stuff up and
put it in storage (we're moving from DC), and hopefully will be able to find a
place easier by being there.

~~~
jamesshamenski
Im moving to nyc in 2-3 weeks as well. Maybe we can join forces and push down
the broker fees. 4 can be stronger than 1.

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desigooner
I wonder if they run into a legal issue at some point of time with people
posting such information on the site.

Wasn't there a case of a tenant being sued for libel by the landlord for
ranting on twitter or blog about something being wrong with the apartment?

Edit: Found the story. [http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/news/2009/07/landlord-sue...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/news/2009/07/landlord-sues-tenant-after-tweet-about-moldy-
apartment.ars)

~~~
dotBen
Yes,I was going to make this point - if you write a bad review and the owners
decide to pursue legal action, there is clearly a trail back to you because
the reviewer must be one of the previous tenants.

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dkasper
My metric for discovering if a place is bad on Craigslist is number of posts.
If a place has been posted more than twice it's almost guaranteed to have
something wrong with it.

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frossie
Oh man. NYT exposure (for <http://badnycapartments.com> ) and their website
can barely handle it and/or has no real content...

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jakewalker
I've been in the market for an apartment in Mountain View (and recently leased
one), and found that it is almost impossible to find an apartment building
(run by management) that doesn't get horrible reviews on ApartmentRatings.com.
Which is unfortunate because unless you really dive in, the tool becomes
completely useless - - it can't be that every apartment is really that awful,
and yet the only people who post reviews are those who are pissed and those
who are shills (probably the management company themselves). I found internet
reviews of apartment buildings completely useless in this regard.

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SilianRail
Oh god they're using Joomla (sobi2)...the usability of the site is really bad.
For example, I searched "291 macdougal street" and it returns all of the
listings...

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awakeasleep
Do the Freakonomics people have any connection to the owners of
badapartmentsnyc.com ?

