What is a REAL Rental listing?

A REAL listing is any listing that you see on the web that you also see in person.

It can be hard to tell if you've had a REAL listings experience. Agents are very good at avoiding the specifics of how their databases are collated and maintained. Some simply do not know themselves how the system works.

But the reality is, Apartment hunters waste a lot of time with listing databases that, beyond a rough sense of the big three (price, number of beds, rough locaiton) are useless Potemkin Villages of model units. The databases contain REAL properties mixed with vague representative listings. Photographs of empty rooms may be accurate, inaccurate, or used over an over again. These photos are shot in such a way that there are no distinguishing details. Just hardwood floors, white walls, and window frames with shades drawn or blown out, overexposed blocks of light. The units could be anywhere, in any number o buildings. That's what the photos are supposed to show. This is a commodity. LIke the photograph of pile of chicken wings on a laminated menu at Chilis.

You don't ask, "Will I be getting THESE EXACT WINGS? That one looks exceptoinally plumg and juicy!"

There's nothing sinister about these photos. I've taken them myself for clients. If you expose for the interior of a room the window gets blown out. These rooms are featureless.