Banning the Bad Brokers

We previously discussed why brokers are necessary in the NYC apartment rental scene – they make deals happen and save everyone a lot of time.

Unfortunately, some bad apples give everyone in the business a negative reputation. Over the past few months, we have significantly stepped up our enforcement efforts and actively suspend or permanent ban agents who intentionally post misleading or false advertisements.

With over a million active rental and sales listings across RentHop and RealtyHop, our small team obviously relies a lot on systematic algorithms to uncover bad actors. We also manually review the most egregious cases to determine whether to permanently bad an agent. Below is one particularly bad example:


 
*An actual conversation excerpt between an agent (“You”), and a renter, name changed

 

We can not tolerate agents who purposefully lie or mislead renters. It harms not only the agent’s reputation, but that of their brokerage firm, RentHop, and all hard-working, honest licensed real estate agents in our community.

On top of that, once outed, the agent was rude and unprofessional to our renter, who obviously did not continue to schedule an appointment. Once our support team uncovered the conversation, we suspended the account immediately.

Lee Lin
Lee Lin
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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