• GiuseppeAndTheYeti@midwest.social
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    23 days ago

    You sure? Cause nothing about what you’re talking about is critical. Part of being a renter is the cost associated with showing units and convincing people to buy. You’re lucky enough to have the capital to own rental property that’s essentially passive income. If you don’t want to put in the effort to show a unit to a potential tenant, then sell the real estate and fuck off with your money.

    “Oh, you’re interested in a desktop PC? It cost us money to power it on and show how well it runs while playing games or using it as a workstation. So to cover that cost we’re going to have to charge you $5 to mess around with a display model.”

    “Test drive a used car on our lot? You’re using 5 minutes of fuel and wearing the tires so $5 please.”

    “Welcome to your local shopping mall. It costs us money to keep the place cool in the summer and we’re tired of people coming in and not buying something so to make sure we recapture that cost, we’re charging $5 at the door.”

    FOOH

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      23 days ago

      Yeah, gone forbid they ask you for a way that ends up giving them your legal name and your home address and a likelihood of your credit rating No one would ever want that for a rental system. /s

      FOOH Right back at you.

      • Stovetop@lemmy.world
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        23 days ago

        You do that when you submit an application, not when you are just looking. Those details are none of their business if I have a look and decide no.

        • rumba@lemmy.zip
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          23 days ago

          I agree completely. I’m not saying that it’s a good system I’m just trying to figure out how they were doing anything useful with a 50-cent charge for a tour.

          • Stovetop@lemmy.world
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            23 days ago

            It’s only 50 cents if you’re looking at 10 other properties managed by the same service. In practice, it’s $5 if you were only looking to tour a single place.

            • rumba@lemmy.zip
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              23 days ago

              The problem I have with it is, if they’re trying to make money from it, the price is way too low. It’s not like a single unit is going to roll in the rent for a month in perspective visits. Letting a practically unvetted person remotely into an apartment that could steal things or hide out in a closet and rape someone… just the insurance to cover that alone would eat up a tremoundous amount of the fee. Cellular lockboxes are hundreds of dollars a piece.

              If it was about money, it would need to be $20 for a single tour on a grand scale to make fiscal sense.

              That’s why I think they’re just using it to harvest your data, that’s worth WAY more than $20 to them.

              • A Wild Mimic appears!@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                23 days ago

                It’s not only to harvest your data to sell, it’s also to know how high the initial rent can be set (before you even see a property). That’s called an unfair advantage.