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November 22, 2007
Renting in Cobble Hill?
Folks,
we've recently started looking for a rental in Cobble Hill, and so far have been very discouraged -- "no fee" apartments are rare and usually crappy.
What incentives do landlords have to rent direct? The renter pays the "finders' fee", the landlord does not have to do anything - is it generally useless trying to find a place (one you can actually raise a family in, not share with someone else looking for a bargain in a nice neighborhood) without paying a broker?
I was able to find 2-3 "by owner" apartments vs about 50 offered by various brokers -- is there a better place to look? With $3,000/mo rents, paying a 12%-15% fee to a broker makes moving a very expensive proposition :(
Any ideas (besides craigslist) are welcome...
Comments
Owners (like me) use brokers for lots of reasons. It filters out inappropriate tenants and saves a lot of time. You may be an excellent prospective tenant for whom the space is perfect, have a great credit background, never gotten into a tiff with a former landlord, will treat the space with respect, have good chemistry with the landlord/their spouse/kids, and not be one of those tenants who call at 4am when they can't figure out how to change a light bulb -- but that is the exception. Brokers serve a purpose. Sure, I think the fees are absurd, but it can be a lot time spent and time = money....
Posted by: guest at November 23, 2007 8:18 AM
I own a couple of buildings in the area and had never used a broker before renting out a whole house, and I am likely to never use a broker again. I used a broker because it was a high end property and figured that people looking for such were more likely to go through a broker. Never again.....stupid bullshit games, ads not in the paper when they said they would be because they just didn't follow up properly, And in the end we got a pretty lousy tenant anyway, despite going through a broker. I think real estate is just hard when you're looking, broker or no broker. And it ain't easy as a landlord, either!
Posted by: guest at November 23, 2007 8:54 AM
Maybe you should move to Ohio.
Posted by: guest at November 23, 2007 8:54 AM
cobble hill is way overpriced compared to Fort Greene and Park Slope
Posted by: guest at November 23, 2007 9:45 AM
it can take a month of looking every day at craigslist to find the right FRBO (for rent by owner) but it is worth it. It only takes 10 minutes a day: 5 minutes in the morning and 5 in the evening. Less if you use an RSS reader anyway and are online a lot. Maybe every 5 days you'll find a listing that looks good, and 1 in 5 of them will work out. Of course some months/seasons are worse than others but that is true for broker listings anyway.
Posted by: guest at November 23, 2007 12:55 PM
What about putting in regular ads yourself, saying you are seeking a FRBO unit, describing yourself as an ideal tenant for a family-size apartment. Post flyers in the neighborhood, too. I've seen those many times in Park Slope. It could be ideal for reaching new homeowners who are renovating a rental unit in a house they bought, who have not yet hired a broker to find tenants. If you really wanted to be creative, you could put a flyer in the door of recently sold 2-family houses in the area you are targeting.
Posted by: guest at November 23, 2007 3:33 PM
why move to park slope when cobble hill?carroll gardens is o much nicer?
Posted by: guest at November 24, 2007 12:07 AM
I also much prefer Park Slope over either Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens, myself.
Cobble Hill is absurdly priced for what it is.
No Park?
No thanks.
Posted by: guest at November 24, 2007 8:07 PM
If you're a parent or a soon-to-be parent, you can join the parents' yahoo group -- bococaparents -- and sometimes you'll see direct rental listings. If you have an NYU connection, the school has an online rental board you can check (at least they used to . . . ). And there's always the Village Voice (unless that's changed, too -- I haven't looked for a new rental in a couple of years), which is definitely not as useful a source these days, but it is where we found our first FRBO rental in Brooklyn Heights in 2003. It can be good because I think there are owners -- often older ones -- who've been around for a while and often have beautiful, old-school places to rent, and are just more familiar with the Voice than with Craigslist. Other than that, it's Craiglist and going to the bigger rental buildings in the 'hood (I assume they exist in Cobble Hill; they do in the Heights) and putting your name on lists with supers or managing agents (I never had any luck with that, but it seemed worth trying).
Good luck!
Posted by: guest at November 24, 2007 9:40 PM
If you don't want to pay a fee stay where you are. You will eventually find something.
Posted by: guest at November 25, 2007 10:08 AM
The great thing about being a broker is that you can lead a long life of doing hard drugs, completely destroying any semblance of a brain, and then you can become a broker and charge renters ungodly sums for "finding" listings and talking up crappy shithole apartments with absurd rents. Everyone wins!
Posted by: guest at November 25, 2007 1:33 PM
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