Work Today in a Not-so-Nutshell
We recently updated to a newer version of our data-mining site for determining reasonable rent - our payment standards have lowered and their site’s estimated market values have too, so our approved rent amounts have been coming back lower than they used to. This is good because of the whole thing where rent has been ballooning astronomically for the past few years and we’re doing something to keep that in check (because even though these are “Crummy Section 8 units and entitled welfare queens don’t deserve decent living lolol also I kill animals for fun and hate the queers lol”, it’s kinda not cool for landlords to jack their prices up 20% a year just because they can, right?).
Well, I’ve had a couple of landlords call in and give me a bunch of shit for not allowing them to charge, say, $100 a month above market value. In the past, this wasn’t really a problem and we’d explain to them exactly what it is about their unit that made it worth less than they wanted (”No, see, I realize that it’s a four bedroom, but it’s only 900 square feet. Do you see how a 1200 square foot 3 bedroom house might get more per month when other factors are held constant?” ....of course, it doesn’t really matter if they “see” it or not because data mining is a legally defensible method for determining reasonable values regardless of landlords’ personal greed, but hey, I guess you have to consider the human factor too, or something).
Anyway, for the last few weeks, our director has been... mm... backpedaling a bit on some of the completed rent comps when landlords call in to complain (because, “Well if they walk in here with a lawyer....” < of course that consideration isn’t given to the tenants because they’re too poor to be able to sue us, right? lol @ poor people)
So rather than having the person who does the initial rent comp re-certify it for the sake of consistency, she’s giving them to other people and telling them to do the re-certifications. I assume she’s doing this because she knows the people doing the original rent comps will put up a stink if she tells them to make sure the approved rent comes back higher (and rightfully so. You have to actively manipulate the result to change that - we go out of our way to make sure the comparable units have high similarity and credibility scores within a specific radius, and changing that is shady, to say the least).
Anyway, one of the ones that I got wind of today came about because a prospective tenant called and was confused about why it was taking so long to get an inspection scheduled. I told her it was because the rent comp came back ~20% lower than what the landlord was asking for, but I noticed that the unit she was asking about wasn’t the apartment number on the rent comp (we do both apartments and houses). I put her on hold and went to ask her caseworker if there was a mistake made, and the caseworker confirmed that the tenant was just wrong about the apartment number. So I made an offhand comment to the tune of, “Okay, cool, so the delay is just because [the apartment complex] is pissy about the approved rent coming back lower than they expected.”
The caseworker looked surprised and told me that my supervisor had re-certified the unit so that it was approved for only $1 below what they were asking for (which is absolute horseshit).
I let the prospective tenant know that her inspection should be scheduled within a week and hopped over to RentWatch to see what my supervisor had changed to get it re-certified for so much higher.
Turns out she swapped two of the three comparable units I had pulled and replaced them with
1). Another apartment in the same complex (this is not okay. This is NOT OKAY. We’re specifically instructed not to do exactly that. There’s no room for interpretation here if we get audited and that comes out).
2). A shared housing unit with questionable similarity and credibility (read: “yellow” and “also-yellow-but-only-meeting-that-threshold-by-one-percent”, which is kind of a no-no). This one was over a mile away from the other two, which is funny, because the two comps I had pulled that she replaced were both over 90% on their similarity and credibility levels and were within half a mile of the apartment complex we were determining rent for, which means that my supervisor looked at the adjusted rent values and just scrolled down until she found something that was close to what they wanted (this is a new feature on the updated version of the site - once you’ve inputted all of the unit information and you view what’s nearby, you can automatically see the absolute and adjusted rent values for those comparable units without selecting them - so you can literally just scroll further and further away from your base unit until you find something that fits the amount of money you’re looking for. I’d like to think people are fundamentally good and wouldn’t abuse that. Sigh).
So it’s a real bummer that my supervisor caved and did this, because she’s emphasized to me in the past not to do either of those things (looking too far away just to find rent that matches and using units in the same complex). I’m sure she only did it because our director threatened her, but still, that shit is super not cool.
