Rental Agents/Realtors in Davis

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Does anyone know of any rental agency other than Veri Realty that I can check out for my landlord? He isn't getting many bites at all on his CraigsList ad and we're both getting worried about the 1st floor not being occupied on September 1. (I don't know why the lack of response when it's a pet-friendly, free garage/off-street parking, queer/poly friendly, free in-house laundry 3-bedroom for a great price. What more can he offer??) He can't pay the mortage without a tenant in there.

He used to use Veri to rent the place out, but Veri is on a different business model now and they charge the landlord $1000 to rent it. He definitely can't afford it. Are there any others that work with Davis properties that I could look into that might be more affordable?

PS- I'm showing the apartment this evening 7:00 PM to 8:15 PM if anyone's interested.

Comments

[leighjen.livejournal.com]

I have no answer to your question, but I know someone who might be looking. Do you have a link to the CraigsList add and/or do you have the rent info and location of the apartment?

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Yep, Here it is!

http://boston.craigslist.org/abo/186147478.html (http://boston.craigslist.org/abo/186147478.html)

They can come see it tonight if they want. The next showing will be this Saturday, 11AM to 1:00PM (unless it rents tonight)

[dangerousface.livejournal.com]

Can you give a little more info on the place, for those of us who might be interested? Where is it? How much? Thanks..

[eclecticavatar.livejournal.com]

the original post (http://community.livejournal.com/davis_square/584946.html#cutid1)

[leighjen.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I didn't put the two together.

[eclecticavatar.livejournal.com]

kalliejenn2 is always looking, but she'd need two others. Maybe you can rent each room singly on CL?

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Well, then I'd have to be more involved with managing the apartment. I'd prefer 3 people who knew each other, or a couple, to be an independant household.

[preraphaelite.livejournal.com]

I'm looking as well, for the record -- and the place looks neat. (sigh) need roommmates.

[eclecticavatar.livejournal.com]

I totally agree that there's a decline, now. When J and I were looking for a July rental, there were so many options and we rented a place very quickly. I have friends that have now been looking and striking out for months!

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Rents sure have come down. My landlord used to get $3000 for the same apartment he now only gets $1800 for. And it's looking like he can't get even that! Right now from the 3 apartments he's only getting rock bottom minimum to cover the mortgage and expenses. Any less and he'd be in the red. Not a good time to be a landlord. :-(

[turil.livejournal.com]

Well, that is sort of how the market works. People who buy a house thinking that they are going to make a ton of profit out of renting it are mostly going to find out that they are wrong. The real money is in buying low and selling high, and paying the mortgage by renting the place out in the meantime (or living there).

If the landlord was really interested in making money, maybe he should have sold the place a few years ago when the market was crazy.

[bex77]

Don't know anything about rental agencies. Sorry.

Have you tried listing the apartment with the real estate offices at the local universities? I know a lot of faculty and grad students from out of state depend on the listings there.

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

Many craigs list ads are put up by realtors; I would look for the same number in several ads, then call and see if they're a firm that might work.

[docorion.livejournal.com]

pheromone is a real estate agent who lives in the area, and I'm sure would *love* to have it in her portfolio. I suspect you can email her at username at livejournal; if that doesn't work, you can email *me* at username at livejournal, and I'll get her email address to you. Good luck!

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

She's actually my BFF. :-) I've been waiting for her to pop into this thread and save the day! :-)

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was gonna say! Hmph. :)

In any case, the nice part is that he can talk to multiple agents without committing to any exclusively, so there can be various places working on renting the place. He can use Zen as well as my office and whomever else.

[spwebdesign.livejournal.com]

Go to Zen Real Estate (http://www.zenrealestate.com/). Ask for Shari Moy. Tell her I sent you. She's fantastic; can't really say enough good.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

From across the pond, a knight in shining armor.:-) I just called, talked to her partner. I'm forwarding the info to my landlord. Thanks!

[artic-monkeys.livejournal.com]

You can try apartment rental experts (http://www.apartmentrentalexperts.com/) , The owner or tenants may need to split or pay a fee. But if the tenants pay the fee you are all set. Another thing to try is an open house. Have an open house on Saturday by advertising the apartment in the globe and on craigs list. It does get a lot of people out and if you find a tenant the owner may pay you a fee instead.

[bostonartist.livejournal.com]

No offense.... but when I read your original ad for the apartment last week here on LJ and you stated that at one time the unit rented for $3,000 / MO in the but it was now "only" $1,800, my suspicious light flashed red. Perhaps others had the same reaction?

[watchamacallit.livejournal.com]

I agree. That looked like a danger sign to me.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

What about it sounded dangerous?

He used to get $3000 for it in the late-90s, because the economy was great and people were willing and able to pay top dollar to live in Davis. Now not many people could afford $3000 a month for rent. The price has dropped gradually since 2001. We've has 4 tenants in the last 5 years (all Tufts/MIT students who graduated and moved on), and each paid a little less than the one before because desperation drove my landlord to drop the price each time. But he can't go any lower than $1800.

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

I still think it sounds fishy (Ball has mostly been where people who couldn't afford to live in Davis went, it's quite a bit not Davis). I lived near Davis in 98 in a 2 bedroom for $825. The rent was going up to 1,000 at the time, so we moved. To a 3 bedroom for $1400.

Anyhow, did you look at similar CL ads? There are an awful lot of 3-bedrooms being offered for $1500 and $1600, many with half fee and most with parking/dishwasher/laundry. There are few ads for 1800+. So it seems the price is barely competetive.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

So how does "fishy" factor in to an $1800 3-bedroom apartment? Uh, no, "fishy" would imply that it's really a 2-bedroom, or that there's a crackhouse upstairs, or that the renter will actually be sending their check to a Bulgarian scammer who will then disappear. Those would be scenarios to which the word "fishy" could aptly be applied. $1800 might be more than you'd be willing to pay for an apartment and that's fine. But something costing more than you'd like does make it "fishy."

[turil.livejournal.com]

When I read that, I was mostly worried that the landlord would be likely to raise the rent significantly as soon as possible. Fishy isn't quite the word I'd use, but it did make me wary.

[bostonartist.livejournal.com]

Plumtreeblossom ;

I don't doubt that you are telling the truth but $3,000 / MO for a 3 bedroom apartment in that house in that area is insane no matter what the economy was doing, unless the place is nothing short of the taj mahal! I have been in Somerville since 1990 and I think that is some sort of a record. Once in a while a landlord is able to get some crazy amount for rent from students who need a place at the last minute and are desperate, but once they realize what is going on and the lease is up the always move out.

[turil.livejournal.com]

The point is that the very high rent that was being charged before was indicative of a landlord who would be likely to raise the rent far beyond what I would be able to pay, if they thought they could get away with it. (By the way, legally, landlords can raise the rent as much as they want simply by not renewing your lease and renting out the place to other people.) I, for one, would rather find a landlord who has a little more heart than that.

Oh, and in my experience, salaries do not go up when the housing market goes up. Sometimes it does, but not necessarily. Certainly if one was a dot com bust victim (like my geek husband), one's salary would have likely have taken a dramatic drop just when housing/rental prices skyrocketed this last time. The reason that the real estate market shot up so fast was that there was a small number of rich young people from the suburbs who decided to move into the city because it was "hip" (while keeping their high salary jobs in the suburbs). They bought houses at exorbitant costs and then had to charge exorbitant rents for the other apartments to cover their monstrous mortgages. The rest of the landlords raised their rents, too, because they could. More hipster wannabees from the suburbs moved into those high rent places, leaving us poor saps who lived and worked in the city (and earned average salaries), as well as many non-rich stufents, pretty darned screwed. Many gave up and moved into their parents houses, or to other less expensive parts of the country. The rest of us downsized, and learned to live with 50-70% of our salries being gobbled up by rent.

However, I completely agree with you that the goverment's analysis of the unemployment problem is lacking in intelligence and accuracy. Not only are they not accurately measuring underemployment, but they also don't even properly measure actual unemployment. They only count people recieving unemployment benefits, which is only available to a small percentage of people who can't get jobs! But, when your country outsources all it's jobs to third and second world countries to save money, it's not surprising that we're losing jobs...

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

To tell you the truth, I think arguing over whether or not the rent was fair a decade ago on a place that none of us have ever seen is ridiculous. But a regular member of the DS community posts here expressing mild distress that her landlord, with whom she has had a good relationship with for years and years, is having trouble renting the place below her. She names a price $150 cheaper than the place I'm in now -- much cheaper than the place I was in before -- and equal to or cheaper than virtually every 3bed we looked at in our search less than a month ago. And immediately a bunch of people jump in and tell her that her problem is clearly that her landlord is a shifty-eyed, heartless, money-grubbing bastard who will have tenants out in the street as soon as he possibly can.

Seriously, what is up with that? I mean, if somebody posted here saying "I saw this 3bed for $1800, it didn't look that great to me, is that a reasonable price?" and you wanted to say that sounded absurd to you, that would be one thing. You'd be helping somebody out. And on this thread just to say that the price sounds to high is your perogative, even though it's obvious that people disagree with you. But to go to these lengths of argument to insist that nobody in their right minds would ever now or possibly in the past have paid such high rents and the landlord is obviously rotten and hard-hearted -- as if you're doing your best to deep-six this community member's attempt to help out her landlord and find fellow housemates she can get along with -- seems unjustified, unsupportive and unkind.

It's the general tone of this part of the discussion, not your particular comments/arguments, that's really bugging me here.

[turil.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry that our concerns bothered you. As for the tone, I really don't know what you imagine we're doing here, as far as I'm concerned we're just letting Peaceblossom know why we thought that the advertisement for the apartment turned us off. She said she was worried that people aren't responding to the ad, and we offered some reasons why that might be happening. We're trying to help here.

We're not at all implying that the landlord is a bad person, just that the ad made it sound like it might not be the kind of place we'd want to rent. That's all. I'm sorry you didn't appreciate our thoughts. Hopefully, Peaceblossom is able to see our constructive ciritcisms as being helpful to her cause.

[turil.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I should have said Plumtreeblossom! My memory sucks for names :-)

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Peaceblossom isn't such a bad name. :-)

Seriously, my landlord is wonderful. He hasn't raised my rent in 6 years, nor the rent of the person in the 2nd floor apartment. I'm very lucky.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Well, what she actually wanted help with was the name of a realtor. It's not that I don't think people should be offering their opinions, but a whole bunch of commenters have been using words like "fishy," "questioning his morals/ethics," "suspicious," "dangerous," wanting a landlord with "a little more heart" -- describing people who would rent from him as "crazy" and "desperate" -- this is what made me feel like it was not exactly constructive criticism.

It's not a big deal. We all know how easy it is to misread tone on LJ. Nor do I have any personal stake in the argument, and it's not criticism (constructive or otherwise) of me, so you really don't need to be "apologizing." I just think it's ridiculous, that's all. Tthe argument was peculiarly unbalanced, and I wanted to offer another voice.

I also looked back and saw that the last two apt rentals placed on this community were for $600 for a room in a 3bed and $590 for a place in a 4bed. So calling this price "not competitive" still makes no sense to me.

[artic-monkeys.livejournal.com]

I would not assume she was lying, but I would question her landlords word and\or ethics. Higher mortgage rates have been a boon to the rental market, as people opted to lease rather than buy a home. U.S. apartment rents increased at the fastest pace in five years during the first quarter, to a record $952 a month from $907 a year earlier, according to the National Multi-Family Housing Council. (http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/28/bloomberg/bxhome.php)

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

And yes, Ball isn't Davis. It's better than Davis for some of us who prefer quiet and low traffic. Bay State Ave is one street over from the Powderhouse park, is leafy and beautiful, and I personal would prefer it 10 times over living smack in noisy Davis above a store (Davis being where I walk to and from in 9 minutes every day, often several times a day). So, Ball is certainly no ghetto or "poor man's Davis" for those of us who choose it intentionally.

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

I said neither, only that Ball Square has always been a fair bit cheaper than Davis.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Our Davis three-bedroom that we moved into just this month is $1950. It's beautiful. All the cheaper places (and we saw a bunch) kind of sucked. I wish ours was $1800 -- fifty bucks less for each of us. Really, the price isn't unreasonable at all. And I seriously have no idea why you're saying that there are very few ads for 3beds near Davis for more than $1800. At least as of four weeks ago, that's simply not true.

[nalz.livejournal.com]

I've used both http://www.bostonapartments.com/, and http://www.allbostonapartments.com to find an apartment in the past. The first you list yourself, the second is an agency.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I used Maven Realty (http://www.mavenrealty.com/) once, but it was about 9 years ago. But they were friendly and they helped me get a good deal on an apartment in East Cambridge. (Their office is right in Davis Square, next to 400 Highland.)

[kglue.livejournal.com]

Do you know what the rationale is behind Veri charging the landlord $1000? Is it so that they can offer the apartment for half fee to prospective tenants, or is it just an add on service fee and they still charge tenants a full month's fee?

Hopefully your landlord can rent it for 1800, but if he can't, then at some point he needs to determine if he can afford to lose 1800 a month or something like 200 a month by reducing the rent.

From my experience moving around Davis Sq (three apartments in the last 4 years), rents seem to have been fairly stable ... well, maybe it's gone down a bit because landlords seem to pick up half or full fees now.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

pheromone explained it to me. Since the agency needs to get paid, when the market is up the tenant pays that fee. When the market is bad, the landlords pay it. When it's in between, it gets split.

My landlord has been trying to avoid the fee altogether by finding tenants ourselves without an agent, but we having gotten many applications. Granted, it's a September rental and we're not even into August yet. But I think he should cover all bases and enlist some agency help.

[fuffer.livejournal.com]

You may want to post pictures in the ad. When I'm looking for an apartment, I skip ads that don't have pictures.

[julishka.livejournal.com]

seconded.

[turil.livejournal.com]

That only works if the place is empty. Otherwise the tennants who live there now have to agree to have their private lives publicly displayed! (Most tennants aren't likely to agree to that, I know I wouldn't.)

i highly recommend...

[thegecko.livejournal.com]

my gf and i just got a place through Boston Rental Exhange, Roy Seidenberg. He owns the agency. He was very friendly and informative and actually did reference (employment and past landlord) checks on us. He gets paid one month's fee, but i thought that all realtors got one month. we split the fee with the landlord.

His office is right in Davis near the Store 24.

[amethystmoon.livejournal.com]

A tip for Craig's List - I don't bother looking at any ad that doesn't have pictures. There's so much text to wade through on that site, and they all sound the same, so I'm not going to schlep my butt all over town to look at houses that I may hate as soon as I walk in the door. I tend to look for one each of the kitchen, bathroom, livingroom, and either a photo of or dimensions of the bedroom (didn't see those in the add either). Bonus point for photos of the outside of the house, or the view from the house.

[amethystmoon.livejournal.com]

also, there's a rental place on College Ave. right across from where the Somerville News offices are. I had a good experience with them as a renter, but I think they did charge the landlord $1000 (seems to be the standard fee - many landlords seem to pass this off to the renters or split it woth them)

Dezray DeCarlo

[awwwfancy.livejournal.com]

I don't know anything about how her company handles landlords, but I rented both of my apartments around here from Dezray DeCarlo at Hunneman Coldwell Banker on Mass Ave. She was extremely professional and relentless at finding us apartments. Both times I paid her a full fee (month's rent).

[elements.livejournal.com]

Veri sucks. I looked at a few places with them many years ago and found them to be rather shady and dishonest - waste of our time taking us to several places they swore were deals and were nothing like what we wanted.

I just rented a lovely 3-bed first-floor in the Ball Square/Powderhouse area for 1650. It might be time for your landlord to consider bringing down the price just a tad. Even 1750 would hit a whole new level of hits for renters using CL. We looked at a whole range of stuff, with the top of our range being 1700, and there were a few other nice places out there in the same range that the apartment might need to be really big or super super cool to get people to spring for 1800 these days. I'd have been willing for my personal rent share to be higher if we'd found an 1800 with a small study, or a second bathroom, for example.

We used Apartment Rental Experts, and I also have heard very good recs for John Lowenstein of Red Line Realty. Last time around I used Maven and they were fine, too. Veri is IMHO the bottom of the barrel of Davis-area realtors.

Also your landlord should be aware that these days, a lot more apartments are going for half-fee to tenant rather than full fee. To many tenants, full-fees simply get ruled out at the get-go.

I also second the recs that you get pics online. I fell in love with my soon-to-be-new home on the basis of its craigslist pics, and the visit was more a confirmation of its awesomeness.