Tips to Know Before Meeting Your Broker in 2014: Understand the Process Going In

It’s time to rent an apartment in New York City! Before you begin searching for apartments and inquiring about their status with brokers, it’s important to prepare yourself. Before meeting a real estate broker, one of the best things you can do is understand the process of renting ap apartment.

Tips to Know Before Meeting Your Broker

This post is the first entry in our series on Tips to Know Before Meeting Your Broker in 2014.ย  The series is based on our experiences shadowing several rental brokers in New York in late 2013.ย  We learned a lot about the best – and worst – ways to work with brokers.

Tip #1:ย  Understand the Process Going In

Itโ€™s a brokerโ€™s job to educate you about the rental process, but your experience will go much more smoothly if you teach yourself a bit about the market first. Understanding whatโ€™s possible (a $1500 studio on the Upper East Side) and what isnโ€™t (the same studio in NoLita) can help you set reasonable expectations. Sites like RentHop can give you a solid sense of the market. Just beware the โ€œfalse educationโ€ of venues like Craigslist, where the preponderance of scams can give you a distorted impression of whatโ€™s out there.

The internet can give you general knowledge of the rental process and market, but thereโ€™s no education like experience. Thatโ€™s why many brokers actually encourage first-time renters to search on their own first. A few even told us that before they became brokers themselves, they never used brokers. Some found apartments through family or friends, others by approaching management companies directly.

As Asha Makalani of Bond NY explained, โ€œIโ€™ve always just been a DIY kind of gal.โ€ Are you surprised that agents would recommend renters try going it alone first? Donโ€™t be. When I asked Makalani what the most frustrating part of her job was, she said without hesitation, โ€œWhen people decide after weeks of working together that they donโ€™t want to pay a fee.โ€ Clients who arenโ€™t really sure they want to pay for a brokerโ€™s services can waste huge amounts of that brokerโ€™s time. And when you work on commission, time is money.

Makalaniโ€™s colleague, Steve Druth, agrees. Druthโ€™s dream client? โ€œOne whoโ€™s gotten screwed over and over and over.โ€ These clients, whoโ€™ve been through the Craigslist gauntlet and interacted with numerous second-rate brokers, come to his office with a hard-won understanding of exactly what heโ€™s saving them from.

Our next tip: make sure that you work with the right expert – it can make all the difference! You can also go see the entire list if you want to look ahead.

Editor’s Note: We updated this article to enhance readability.ย 

lawrence
lawrence
Lawrence part of the RentHop Data Science team with over a decade of experience in the real estate industry. In addition, he is a software developer and quantitative analyst with over 12 years of experience in software development and quantitative modeling. Lawrence merges two of his passions together to help renters across the nation with their home search.

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