this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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Mildly Infuriating
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We're missing some critical data here.
The price is really low. Not in a value proposition way but looking at minimum wage...
If you have an agent that drives to the rental property, talks to you let you in walks around with you for 15 minutes maybe
That's $5 for 10 tours. That's $0.50 per tour.
These have to be virtual tours, or VR tours. Or maybe the real first tired of getting stood up, or tired of people trying to see every property that exists without ever buying anything.
There's something strange with that.
Edit: someone linked the actual site theyre self tours, they're using the payment to collect data on the prospective tenants. Forcing you to pay with a non-gift card credit card means they get enough information to do a Nexus lookup on you.
we're not missing anything. renters don't pay for tours of units. that's the landlords problem. this is just all kinds of fucked up.
They're self tours. They're forcing you to pay a pittance with a identifiable credit card (not a gift card) which gives them your billing address The name associated with your bank account and with a quick joint through Nexus you're approximate credit score and amount of money you make.
At 50 cents a tour nobody's making any money off of it they're not even making enough money to pay for the internet connected lock they put on the door
50/c/tour using highly cacheable data is easily profitable. but profitability is a completely unrelated point. as you touched on briefly.
Which takes me back to: 'this is just all kinds of fucked up'
The price at all is ridiculous. Touring a rental is a sales action. Yes you have to pay for someone to administer a tour, but that's a cost of doing business. It's also weird because you generally don't pay to tour homes for purchase.
Those sound like "cost of doing business" as a landlord/management agent.
You keep saying this. Is that better? Like what makes any of what they are doing ok?
Nothing about your original comment reads as anything but defending that practice. Everything you said is factual, and it all sounds like defense. I appreciate that you laid out all the information that you did, but it reads like you’re saying “just playing devil’s advocate” when you’re just trying to spin a narrative that this is ok when that isn’t reality.
for appreciating it, you certainly have downvoted every comment I made here.
You are free express these bootlicker opinions, we are free to respond to them.
Why are they charging customers then?
I'm not buying it. Your explanation doesn't defend the $11.99 "product" and you can do an Auth on a credit card and get that same info without doing a Settle which actually takes money from the person. At worst, you could say its a refundable deposit, but its not that either. This is simply a cash grab charging for something that was included for free before.
No
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What the hell are you on about? Renters accompany prospective buyers on tours or walk throughs. No one is doing remote tours.
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.
You're missing the point, which is that estate agents already get paid by the landlord for this. Charging renters is just extra money for doing what they already did.
And in sane places it doesn't happen, and is often illegal.
It's real.
https://futurism.com/rently-apartment-tours
I take issue with the phrase "landlords don't need to lift a single finger"
I'm in the process of selling my house (in the UK) right now so I can move to somewhere cheaper. We have people coming round to view it on maybe a twice- or thrice-weekly basis. I don't even know their names. The estate agent (American: "realtor") handles all of that. I just get a phone call telling me they've got someone who wants to come and view at X date and time, all I have to do is say yes or no then arrange to not be home. It's all included in the frankly breathtaking sum I'm paying the estate agent.
I can't imagine rental properties are different in any meaningful way.
Low?! The price should be zero.
If you're trying to sell a product, the last thing you want to do is create a barrier between potential customers and the sales pitch. Most people are going to look at the free homes first, and probably move into one of those before they pay a fee to see something they might not even want.
The only way this fee helps the company is if they have a monopoly on the area and people have no other choice than to pay to play.
Half the time they just send you a (usually wrong) door code or tell you to knock on the door and ask the existing tenants.
But also, the onus to pay a broker should NEVER be on the renter. That's a transaction between the broker and the landlord. If a landlord can't afford a broker they can show the place themselves. If a renter can't afford a broker they're locked out of the transaction altogether.
there's probably a commission system built-in to pay the value of a month's rent or something to the 'agent' when you sign a lease. which means, of course, they're financially motivated to steer you to better paying properties (for them), not better units or locations for you.
One month rent was the going rate for a real estate agent to fill a rental for you in my area 6 months ago. Paid by the landlord/property owner