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July 25, 2007
Quickly compare your rent to your neighbors
Our landlord does not charge us nearly enough rent. I know this because I check out craigslist from time to time and compare properties in this area. Luckily, our landlord seems more intent on having good tenants than charging us market rates, so we're definitely not putting in a meth lab.
Anyway, here's a nifty tool called Rentometer to help you figure out what your neighbors pay in rent. Type in your address and rent and it brings up a google map with the rents in nearby places that have the same number of bedrooms. I don't know how accurate it is and it lumps together condos, single unit houses, and apartment complexes. The real value is that it provides a snapshot of the median rents in a given area. This way you can quickly find a location in your price range if you're thinking of moving.
Plus, if you check back once in a while, you can see if rents are rising and you're getting a good deal or if rents are falling and you need to approach your landlord for a decrease in the rent. You can also use What the Neighbors Pay website to do a similar sort of analysis.
Finally, just for people in San Francisco, you can use this neat tool to look at rents over time in "the city" - excuse me, "The City" - based on craigslist posts.
Posted by brian at July 25, 2007 02:35 PM
Comments
actually i've used rentometer and it helped me explain to my landlord why they were charging too much. got the rent knocked down $100 per month when we moved in so that was awesome.
Posted by: sbromar at July 31, 2007 05:35 PM
thank you for the website. do you know how rentometer works? do they take what people put in and adjust the rents? that means landlords can artificially raise the rents by adding fake values at their website. or do they only use newspaper ads and such? just curious. SL
Posted by: sally longston at August 1, 2007 06:47 AM