Someone I work with is looking to rent a home. They pulled up a rental listing on their trusty realtor.com iPhone app. Right area, right price range, perfect. So they give the company (WestsideRentals) a call. The person on the other end of the call said that in order to get anymore information or see the home they needed to buy a membership to their company.
Really?
My question is this, is this common practice nowadays with rental listings? Does realtor.com (or any of the other portals) allow this “pay to see more” type of rental listings?
Looks like the realtor.com might be trumping the real listing with a scam listing. Zillow.com shows the listing coming from Orange County Property Management, Inc.
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2107-Earnshaw-Dr-Placentia-CA-92870/25374648_zpid/
Listing agent’s site:
http://www.orangecountypropertymanagement.com/Nav.aspx/Page=%2fListNow%2fProperty.aspx%3fPropertyID%3d2287839%26%3d%26
Contact phone #: (714) 840-1700
hmm, is that Zillow with more accurate data than realtor.com?
What’s actually more exciting to me about this listing is that the Z feed’s listing website for this property points to a product that myself and the team at Advanced Access launched over TEN YEARS AGO. It looks exactly the same.
It’s one way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Those that sign up are serious about finding a place.
As far as allowing it, I think the MLSs are restricted from banning various types of business models. Westside has a link to their broker’s license page at the CA Bureau of Real Estate page with no complaints.
@Jon Zillow has it listed for “sale” and realtor.com has it listed for “rent”, both at $2,595.
Westside Rentals is a valuable tool in the box, at least for the 20-30s age range in the Los Angeles area. Now, the data is often crap, with duplicates and old listings galore, but if you weed through it with common sense, you are able to find listings that aren’t posted on craigslist or realtor.com (and if they are posted in other locations they are limited data.) In the Los Angeles market, $40 bucks for an edge over other apartment seekers is nothing, considering current outrageous rental prices. A little while back you might have noticed a job listing on move.com for, basically, someone to build their outreach for the rental market. Seems like they will begin reaching out to these niche sites for their data.