Don’t Dunning-Kruger Your Way Into a Lease

Rental Reality, Part One

[Gray dots rhythmically bounce.]

Chime! “Is this available?”

[Gray dots disappear.] [Gray dots return.] [Gray dots rhythmically bounce.]

Chime!

“Are you interested?”

And that concludes one of the least productive conversations in the history of commerce.

If you have ever sold anything on Facebook Marketplace, you already know this exchange. The “Is this available?” button may be one of the most efficient technologies ever invented for helping two people communicate absolutely nothing.

I recently advertised a couple of inexpensive rentals near central Houston. The ad included the rent, deposit, number of bedrooms, general location and instructions for contacting me. It also specifically asked people not to send “Is this available?” They sent it anyway. Now, knowing whether an apartment is still available is obviously useful. But help me help you here…. Follow it with something: “Is this available? Can I see it Thursday after five? I have two cats. What’s the pet deposit? What’s the income requirement?” Those questions move the conversation towards your goals. The problem isn’t being annoying on FB. But that is an example of the cheapest lesson in a process that gets considerably more expensive as you move through it.

Read what people give you. Didn’t read the ad? You wasted a few minutes. Didn’t read the screening criteria? You may waste an application fee. Didn’t read the lease? Well. Now we’re playing with actual money.

Read the ad. Read the instructions. For the love of God, read your lease.

Nobody is born knowing how to rent an apartment There is an enormous amount of housing knowledge families quietly pass from one generation to the next. Maybe your parents taught you to check your credit before applying. Maybe Mom tells you to photograph every scratch before you move your furniture in. (Listen to Mom.)

In Texas, your lease will typically include or address a move-in inventory and condition form, and the lease tells you how long you have to return it. Read it. This is where “everything important happens in the fine print” stops being a cute newsletter tagline and starts protecting your security deposit. Maybe Dad asks whether water is included… somebody explains that $1,100 in monthly rent doesn’t necessarily mean $1,100 is all you’ll need to get the keys… Or maybe nobody tells you shit.

Yet you’re expected to jump into a transaction involving credit reports, income verification, deposits, background checks and a legally binding contract and magically know how all of it works. That’s who I’m writing this for. But if you’ve been renting for 15 years, stay with me; you may recognize a few things you wish somebody had told you the first time.

I recently pulled MLS data on Houston area rentals priced from $900 to $1,400, roughly the territory where a lot of new and budget conscious renters are shopping. Something surprised me. This summer, those rentals were sitting at roughly 46 median cumulative days on market. Across Houston area MLS rentals at all price points, the number was closer to 30 days. Cheap, apparently, does not automatically mean easy.

Those numbers alone don’t tell us if the difference comes from location, condition, screening requirements, applicant qualifications, property type, or some combination of all of them; MLS data only tells what happened to the listing, not much about everything in between listing and lease. It doesn’t count the person who messaged three times and disappeared, the student who needed a nine-month lease, the person who loved the apartment but couldn’t make the deposit work, or any of the conversations happening at the front door. I do. And lately I’ve had a lot of them: lots of interest, lots of people trying to make the numbers work, and an astonishing number of people who make appointments and simply don’t show up.

Reliability is free. I understand the internet has spent several years teaching us that you don’t owe anyone anything. Sometimes that’s useful advice. You absolutely can cancel an appointment with me; you don’t owe me the intimate details of your personal life, and you can decide you hate the apartment, hate the neighborhood, hate the backsplash, or simply don’t feel like leaving your house today. Just tell me you’re not coming. Somebody drove there, unlocked the door and arranged other commitments around that appointment. You didn’t ghost Walmart. There’s another person standing on the other side of this transaction. After “I’m definitely coming Thursday,” no-show; “I’m so sorry. Can we do Saturday?” no-show; “Hey, is this still available?” we have entered Boy Who Cried Wolf territory and I’m sorry, but I no longer have much confidence in what “I’m coming” means.

That isn’t a screening criteria. Reliability is not the same thing as qualification. A punctual person can fail to meet a property’s requirements and someone who runs late everywhere may qualify just fine; but being easy to work with has value, and when money is tight, reliability is one of the few things you can bring to a housing transaction for free.

I’ve had young renters arrive at inexpensive apartments dressed as though they were going to a job interview, and I actually think it’s sweet. You do not need a blazer to tour an $1,100 apartment. Nobody should be deciding whether you deserve housing because you own business casual. On the other hand, perhaps don’t arrive in Cookie Monster pajama pants. (Some of you needed to hear that!) The useful part of “dress for success” isn’t about the clothes; it’s realizing that you’re entering a transaction where reliability matters.

Have some self-awareness: keep the appointment or cancel it, have your documents ready, know approximately what you earn and read the screening criteria before paying somebody to screen you. If you need something unusual, say so early; a nine-month lease because you’re in school is a reasonable question (if albeit unlikely doable), but it’s a much better question before the application than after everybody has spent three days processing one.

And tell the truth about your situation. A young man called me from a rental sign this week looking for his first apartment. I couldn’t immediately drop what I was doing, so I told him I could meet him but he’d have to wait around about 20 minutes. He waited. (A quick aside about calling agents: don’t expect everyone to answer. Our phone numbers are publicly advertised, which means our phones are also subjected to an ungodly amount of spam. Leave a voicemail and, if you really want a response, send a text too. A good agent will return the voicemail. A lazy one will probably answer the text. Your objective here isn’t to determine whether the real estate profession deserves your admiration; it’s to get inside the apartment. Remember you have a goal; secure housing)

What do you know? He liked it! Yay for me. There was one potential weakness in his application: he’d never rented before. We can work with that! I explained the income requirement and the documents we’d need; he told me he had very good credit, and I explained that strong credit might help offset the absence of rental history depending on what the landlord found acceptable. In a few hours, he delivered his ID and two pay stubs. Before ordering the paid background screening, our property team reviewed his basic information.

There isn’t much point in letting somebody spend money on a screening report if information already sitting in front of us shows they don’t meet the property’s basic requirements. Everything looked good… we sent the screening link… it came back exactly as he’d represented himself: very good credit and low use of his available credit. The landlord approved him. His first apartment cost him a $400 deposit and $815 in prorated first month’s rent to get started; from showing to completed application process, less than 24 hours.

First time does not have to mean unprepared. No rental history? Ask what else the owner considers. Depending on the property’s criteria, good credit, a qualified cosigner, sufficient income or additional money in the bank may strengthen an application without a previous landlord attached to it.

Texas law addresses tenant selection criteria, which can include rental history, income, credit history and other factors. Read the criteria before you spend the application money. And don’t assume your only options are giant apartment complexes or driving around looking for handwritten phone numbers because your application isn’t perfectly conventional.

You may hear that you’re better off renting directly from an individual landlord. Sometimes you are. But don’t rule out working with a REALTOR® just because a property appears in the MLS. An MLS listing does not automatically mean your future landlord is a member of Dr. Evil’s real estate fund! Plenty of those properties have an ordinary human being behind them who owns one or two rentals and hired an agent or a small property management company because they don’t particularly want strangers calling their cell phone during dinner. Dr. Evil, obviously, is not fucking around with a duplex and a single-member LLC. He understands tranches and mortgage-backed securities. He’s into that sweet sweet Private Equity.

When the application is more complicated…

If your rental history has a more serious problem, you may sometimes have better luck farther outside the institutional system. This is where the bandit signs come in, an old-school real estate term for those cheap corrugated signs with handwritten phone numbers stuck beside roads and intersections. (An older agent taught me the term years ago. I never asked why they call them that, and now I picture the Hamburglar running around after dark with a hammer and a stack of rental signs. I’m rolling with it now.) But if you’re calling one because you have an eviction or another serious problem in your rental history? Then transparency matters.

There are terrible landlords. I’ve worked in real estate long enough that you don’t have to convince me of that; people get treated unfairly, repairs don’t get made, disputes get ugly and sometimes a tenant genuinely gets screwed. I’ve also been doing this long enough to know that isn’t every eviction. If there’s one in your history, explaining why everybody else was wrong isn’t particularly useful to the person deciding whether to take a chance on you now. You don’t need to write a novela. Just tell them what happened and, more importantly, what’s different. “I lost my job. I’ve been continuously employed for three years since.” “There was an eviction filing, but the case was dismissed. Here’s the disposition.” “I owed the landlord money. It’s paid.”

An eviction court case can remain on a tenant screening report for up to seven years, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau notes that many landlords won’t rent to an applicant whose report shows an eviction filing. Notice that I said filing.

A filing doesn’t necessarily mean somebody was ultimately evicted. Screening reports can also contain mistakes, including incorrect dispositions and duplicate or outdated eviction information; the CFPB recommends checking your own report and disputing inaccuracies. Know what’s on yours before you start trying to explain it. I’m not interested in doing the Facebook Karen thing here and pretending every bad mark on a rental history is proof somebody needs to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Sometimes people get screwed. Sometimes landlords behave badly. Sometimes tenants do too.

Accountability goes both ways, which means if we want a fairer system everybody still has to own the part that actually belongs to them. If you’re asking someone to look past an eviction, the useful part of the story isn’t that you were the helpless victim of a cartoonishly evil landlord; it’s what happened, what you did about it and why the person standing in front of them now is a better bet.

Before you hand over money

This is where I would actually like new renters to become mildly annoying. Ask questions: “What is this fee? Is it refundable? What’s the deposit, when is it due, what happens to it if I’m not approved, and when do I get keys?” Texas law distinguishes between an application fee, which is nonrefundable and intended to offset screening costs, and an application deposit, which is refundable if the applicant is rejected. The terminology matters. And then there are stories from the internet. According to a Reddit poster (which is already a sentence that should come with an asterisk), a Texas renter recently claimed they were asked for roughly $2,850 in security deposit and administrative fees before being allowed to review the actual proposed lease. Assuming the account is accurate, I have questions. Maybe there’s a perfectly legitimate explanation, maybe we’re missing context, maybe somebody was getting scammed. Cool story, bro. Not cool at all, actually. Who was the agent? 👀 (You don’t have to name names in the comments. My DMs work.)

The useful lesson isn’t that every unusual payment request is fraud; it’s much simpler: if somebody wants a substantial amount of your money but doesn’t want you to understand what you’re agreeing to, slow the fuck down. Know who you’re paying, know what you’re paying for, know the terms attached to it and read the document. For the love of God, read your lease.

Eventually, the Facebook ad becomes an application, the application becomes an approval, the approval becomes a lease, and the consequences for not reading increase at every step. Your lease tells you things the apartment tour didn’t: notice requirements, renewal terms, late fees, pet rules, utilities, parking, maintenance procedures, move-out obligations and what happens if you need to leave early. It also tells you about seemingly mundane things that can become expensive later.

Remember Mom taking pictures? This is why. You don’t have to understand every sentence the first time you read it; ask. That’s what the agent, leasing office or property manager is there for. The point of all this isn’t to turn a 22-year-old looking for an $1,100 apartment into a real estate professional. God forbid. We have enough of those.

Housing has rules, expenses and customs that aren’t obvious until somebody teaches them to you. Some people inherit that knowledge AND help for the deposit. Some don’t. You don’t need to know everything before you rent your first apartment, and frankly the people who think they already know everything are how we ended up with the title of this article. Read the ad. Read the instructions.

And for the love of God: read your lease.