Lee Lin

Brokers and Landlords

High Resolution Pricing: Agents and Broker Edition

November 26, 2019

One of our Y Combinator batch mates way back in Summer 2009 was a company called InstantQ, founded by Dana Levine and Jeff Shi. They were an early version of Groupon, allowing restaurants to fine tune pricing specific...

Apartment Hunting

Better Than No Fee? Free Rent!

November 25, 2019

We previously discussed the concept of 1 AND 1 pricing. That is, the landlord should be willing to pay the broker fees for finding high quality tenants to fill a vacancy, and they should still offer all of...

Rental Management

Exclusive Apartment Listings with Full Address Take Priority

November 22, 2019

The RentHop HopScore takes into account over 100 parameters when ranking listings in our search results. While the formula is constantly changing, it is not a black box deep learning algorithm. Our team of engineers and real...

Entrepreneurship

Is WeWork Default Dead or Default Alive?

November 21, 2019

Previously we talked about How Not To Die as a real estate agent. Another infamous Paul Graham term is "Default Alive or Default Dead". It sounds extremely harsh and morbid, but that's part of the point. Calling a company...

Rental Management

Open Listing == Crowd Sourcing

November 20, 2019

An Open Listing arrangement allows multiple brokers to compete with each other to find a suitable tenant to rent a vacant apartment. It works best in markets such as New York City, with a high volume of interested...

Other

Yet Another StreetEasy Price Hike

November 20, 2019

Prices on Zillow-owned StreetEasy continue to rise. It was free to post a rental exclusive until August 2017, when prices jumped to $3 per day. In Jan 2019 the price jumped 50% to $4.50 per day. Starting Jan 2020, the...

Rental Management

The 1 OR 1 Problem, No Fee, OP, and Net Effective Scams

November 19, 2019

Yesterday we gave a simple example of net effective price calculations. There is also a more in-depth explanation in our rental guide. In an ideal world, the net effective price is identical whether you approach a landlord directly or...

Rental Glossary

What is Net Effective Rent?

November 18, 2019

The net effective rent is the monthly amount the tenant pays to the landlord after factoring in incentives. The term is common when searching for apartments in New York City, especially during the off-peak winter season. This is when...

Rental Glossary

Can a Home Office be a Bedroom?

November 15, 2019

Don't worry, this is not a tax deduction discussion related to whether you can expense your bedroom as a home office. Instead of asking whether a bedroom can count as a home office, we want to know: can a...

Brokers and Landlords

Banning the Bad Brokers

November 14, 2019

We previously discussed why brokers are necessary in the New York City apartment rental scene - they make deals happen and save everyone a lot of time. Unfortunately, some bad brokers give everyone in the business a negative reputation....

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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).

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Apartment HuntingNovember 1, 2024

Lee Lin

About Me

Latest News

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