Lee Lin

Landlords of All Sizes List Apartments for Free

As many of you know, RentHop.com has been a free source of New York City apartments from the first day of our launch. We began as a collection of no-fee listings from some of the largest landlords in Manhattan....

How to Negotiate a Lower Apartment Rent

After managing a site dedicated to no-fee apartments in New York City for so long,  one of the more frequent visitor questions we receive is, "How do I negotiate with the broker or landlord for a lower rent than...

No-Fee Landlord AIMCO NYC Listings Now on RentHop

Rent Hop is happy to welcome AIMCO NYC to our growing list of no-fee landlords in Manhattan. AIMCO NYC buildings largely span the Upper East Side and Upper West Side neighborhoods, including the West 68th and West 69th Street...

Post Your No-Fee Manhattan Apartment

After months of catering mostly to apartment hunters and large property management landlords, RentHop has now launched a special program for smaller-scale landlords to post a no-fee Manhattan apartment.  Visitors to our site will now be able to tap...

Schedule Apartment Viewings with RentHop.com

RentHop already provides a comprehensive repository of Manhattan rental listings, complete with the phone number, building address, and website for many hundreds of units.  Our visitors are welcome to use this information to contact the landlords and schedule viewings...

No-Fee Apartments Rentals NYC!

Entrepreneurs know that the key to most great innovation isn't an incremental improvement on the status quo, or a slightly more efficient and optimized implementation of an old spec. As Christensen writes in the infamous Innovators' Dilemma, the real...

Flip Tax Shortages: Double Whammy For Co-op Buyers

In today's piece, we take a break from the usual rant about no fee Manhattan rentals lists and focus on the sales market. The Nasty Closing Cost: Flip Tax After reading Teri Rogers's article in the New York Times, The Downside...

How Large is the New York Apartment Broker Industry?

How large is the New York apartment broker industry?  We always hear that the non-agency mortgage-backed securities market is a  $800 billion dollar market, based on notional value (that includes CMBS, for the purists).  The whole loans market for...

Bootstrapping Fun: How Much Will New York City Apartment Rents Fall?

As part of our quest to collect as many no-fee apartment listings as possible across New York City, we end up sifting through a lot of data. We'll review information about neighborhoods, buildings, and most interesting of all, changes...

Welcome New York Times Readers

We are thrilled that so many new visitors have found us through the recent New York Times article.  In fact, for most of the weekend, we were the second most popular piece of news in the entire real estate...

About Me

Lee is a data geek from MIT who spent years at quantitative hedge funds cranking out models to explain and predict financial markets. Real estate has always been a big part of Lee's life. He grew up helping out at his parents' Jersey Shore motels, became a landlord his first year out of college, analyzed mortgages on a fixed-income trading desk, and acquired a New York real estate license. At RentHop, he combines his nerd talents and real estate knowledge to constantly tweak the secret HopScore. He currently lives near Bryant Park and his favorite restaurant was Cafe Zaiya (now known as Tomiz).

Latest News

The stores at 55 Fulton Street in Financial District, Manhattan

A major criteria for renters when searching for a new home is its proximity to grocery stores. With the...