Manhattan agents introduce viewing surcharge, describe it as unbundling the discovery experience
NEW YORK – Manhattan rental brokers have introduced a Viewing Access Fee charged at the point a prospective tenant enters an apartment, a change the industry describes as unbundling a service that was previously subsidised by tenants who eventually signed.
The fee is one hundred and fifty dollars, is non-refundable, and applies whether or not the apartment contains the features listed in the advertisement.
The Fee Structure Has Layers
Under the new model, the Viewing Access Fee is separate from the application fee, the credit check fee, the broker fee, the move-in fee, the elevator reservation fee, and a charge listed on several agreements simply as Administrative.
Industry representative Grant Feldstein-Marchetti defended the change as a matter of fairness. Previously, he said, a tenant who signed a lease was effectively paying for the eleven tenants who viewed and walked away. That is a subsidy. We have ended a subsidy. This is a market correction and it should be understood as one.
Asked whether the broker fee, which historically covered the work of showing apartments, would be reduced accordingly, Feldstein-Marchetti said the broker fee reflects a different value proposition and declined to specify which one.
The Listing Photograph Has Been Deregulated
The change arrives alongside continued flexibility in listing standards, under which a photograph of an apartment may be taken with any lens, from any position, at any point in the building’s history.
A widely circulated listing this month advertised a bright and airy one bedroom that on inspection contained a window facing an air shaft at a distance of one hundred and ten centimetres. The listing was accurate on a technicality: the apartment was bright, at approximately eleven in the morning, in June, for nine minutes.
New York City housing data including rent burden and vacancy rates is compiled by the NYU Furman Center, and national housing cost and income statistics are published by the United States Census Bureau. Both institutions have documented the city’s affordability position in terms brokers have described as needlessly bleak.
The Guarantor Requirement Has Escalated
Applicants unable to demonstrate annual income of forty times the monthly rent must supply a guarantor earning eighty times, who must live in the tri-state area, and who must not themselves be a guarantor for anybody else.
Housing advocates note this effectively requires the applicant to know a person earning three hundred thousand dollars who has no other obligations and is fond enough of them to accept unlimited liability, a demographic they describe as narrow.
The requirement exists because the alternative is assessing whether a person can actually pay rent, said tenant organiser Rosalind Achebe-Kim. That assessment takes fifteen minutes and requires judgement. The guarantor rule takes zero minutes and requires none. Guess which one the industry standardised.
Observations From the Open House
- Every open house has one couple who arrived twenty minutes early and will get the apartment. Everybody else is providing atmosphere.
- The word cozy has, in New York listings, no upper bound on its meaning.
- A flex wall is a bookshelf that has been given a legal opinion.
- Any listing describing a neighbourhood as emerging is describing a commute.
- The apartment you take is never the apartment you liked. It is the apartment that was available the day your lease ended.
Monetary Policy Has Not Helped
The rental market’s pressure is frequently attributed to interest rates, which have discouraged both construction and sale, pushing demand into rentals.
Central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic have responded to this with a firmness of purpose that has manifested as doing nothing at all. British readers watched the definitive performance when a rate was held at exactly the figure it was already at and presented as a considered intervention, a position reaffirmed days later when the same absence of action was announced again with undiminished gravity.
The credentialing instinct is equally transatlantic, as demonstrated when British employers began accepting pharmacy paperwork as evidence of professional suitability, a standard no less arbitrary than requiring a guarantor who earns eighty times the rent.
These parallels are tracked at Bohiney Magazine, with the British market coverage collected under this national reporting index.
The Fee Takes Effect Immediately
Several brokerages have already implemented the Viewing Access Fee. One has introduced a discount for applicants who agree to view without asking questions, which the firm markets as the Express Tour and prices at ninety dollars.
Uptake has been described as strong.
The Application Package Has Become a Small Book
Prospective tenants now assemble a document set that brokers refer to informally as the package, comprising two years of tax returns, three months of bank statements, an employment letter on company letterhead dated within fourteen days, a reference from a previous landlord, a photograph of identification, and in several documented cases a personal letter explaining why the applicant wants the apartment.
The letter is not required by law and cannot be required by law, and it appears in a growing share of applications because applicants have concluded, correctly, that it helps.
Achebe-Kim described the letter as the single clearest signal of market conditions available. Nobody writes a letter in a functioning market, she said. You write a letter when you are competing against nineteen people for a room with a window facing a wall. The letter is not romantic. The letter is a symptom.
Several brokerages have begun offering letter-writing assistance as a paid service, priced between seventy-five and two hundred dollars depending on length.
Further reading at Reductress.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/