the apt hung

I haven't had the misfortune in many years of going through the process of having to rent an apartment and I should thank the good-lord above every day for that.   Although I realized it in concept the actual racket that is the NYC real-estate market didn't fully hit me until earlier this week when I started inquiring about rentals and was told that the typical broker's fee is between 12 and 15% of a year's rent.    Only in NYC does the renter pay the brokers fee but now that fee has jumped from a month's rent a few years ago to something that can easily approach $4000.      Have you seen the amount of energy a broker puts into a rental?   If you haven't ever seen one who looks like they are hustling it's not because they are the Joe DiMaggio of brokers but probably because the vast majority of them don't show any initiative what so-ever.     Just look at the websites devoted to rentals and you'll see they are shoddy and filled with typos and grammatical errors.   Often the information in the listing is at best a stretch and often a complete fabrication especially when they mention neighborhoods.    It's not uncommon to see things listed in Prospect Heights which are located in the heart of Bed-Stuy or a place listed in Carrol Gardens which is located well into Gowanus.     But even that would be doable with google-maps but before you trek out to one of these rat-infested crackhouses you want to get an idea of what you might be seeing, the problem is that the pictures of apartments look like they were taken using a Blackberry and most of the time the people taken them couldn't even bother to open the shades to let in some light.    The funniest thing is that they all show you a picture of the bathroom and another of a stove.   If you have only four pictures to use to try to sell me into your dump why do you show the one room in an apartment which looks exactly like every other apartment's bathroom.   The bathroom picture is ridiculous but the stove one really gets me to reason that people must really afraid to rent an apartment and find out it doesn't have a stove.

 Now try to get one of these guys to show you an apartment, you would think that if they stood to make 4 grand they would be fawning over their potential clients but these guys hardly return a phone-call or offer a helpful suggestion.