If the apartment is currently occupied, write a brief informal note telling the tenant you're considering their apartment and would they send you a brief honest review of how their time there has been. Include a SASE & an email address. Address it by hand to Current Resident, and drop it in a mailbox. You could even include a $5 gift card to starbucks or something. Seems you would have a pretty good chance at a thoughtful response & it's a lot less invasive than just going up and knocking on their door.

But your idea is indeed less invasive.

Sadly, NYC apartment hunting is a little different. Landlords and apartments have a huge incentive to use their limited advertising bandwidth on already vacant apartments.

Vacant apartments cause landlords to bleed more money than almost-vacant apartments, and brokers are all about selling quickly in volume, which is easier to do when the aparmtent is vacant (easy to photograph, easy to show)

One possible solution is to take advantage of the likelihood the last tenant still has forwarding setup with the USPS. If you could snoop out their last name, you could send the note addressed to them at the apartment and it would likely be forwarded to them where ever they went.

Imagine a site called One-Star-Yelp.com, a subset of Yelp that only has reviews which scored 1-star ratings. The only reason you would visit is for entertainment value, not to look for tips on where you will dine tonight.

Maybe the best solution is to log all 311 calls (NYC's complaint hotline), and then let entrepreneurs freely mine the data to be put to good use.

[EDIT: I see now the massive value of steering people to non-crappy, but I think a blacklist would be far too hard to construct to be valuable vs. a whitelist]

There's also a slight difference in the services. It's quite easy to find out the positives about living in a certain place (location, size, etc) and if there's any information imbalance about something good the landlord/broker will do their best to rectify it.

I never understood why this icked someone out (unless they were murdered by a random drive-by - that indicates a local crime problem).

I'd LOVE to find a place that wasn't renting because someone died in it - I wouldn't care in the least, and the rent would be low.

Also, many things can be checked even without asking if you know what to look for.

If you want to remove the information asymmetry, you need a random sample of previous tenants. This is hard to get unless you force people to write reviews or provide some incentive that is stronger than their urge to complain.

Example: there's an apartment near where I live which looks like a great deal on paper, but on some internet review site there were lots of complaints about how there are hidden fees for things like parking, and how the apartments aren't insulated so you end up with a huge heating bill. I didn't see those complaints with other apartments, so I think they're legit.

But that's not the point with this site. As an apartment hunter (probably from another city or state), you have little information on structural problems with the apartment. How can you find out if your 1st-floor apartment floods or lacks concrete foundation? Your realtor or landlord probably won't tell you the truth.

So, instead, you can turn to former tenants. This site isn't a review data aggregator--it's a tool for reaching informational equilibrium.

This is entirely explained by game theory. If you think the final star rating for something should be something other than what the average currently is, you maximize your power over the rating by using only 1 or 5 star ratings.

To me, it looks like a self-selection issue: people only review a product if it either (a) changes their life positively, or (b) causes them trouble. If a product only impacts someone's life in a trivial way, well, why write a 3-star review for a trivially good product?

Agree with random samples. Also need larger samples. Or something like a carfax for apartments.

Also, hoping they expand into other areas; no reason to limit this to NYC. I've got a couple of places in Dallas I'd gladly register to bitch about.

It really depends on what you are looking for. We stayed in Williamsburg for the duration of our trip (about 5 days) to get a feel for it, as lots of people recommended it. It turns out we didn't really like it (nothing bad per se, just not what we're looking for).

We settled on Lower East Side, as it best represents what we're looking for.

To handle the issue of apartment hunting while not living there, we're going to end up just using airbnb to find a monthly rental, move our stuff up and put it in storage (we're moving from DC), and hopefully will be able to find a place easier by being there.

We're going to live in Brooklyn for sure. My girlfriend likes Brighton Beach, and I'm from Russia, originally, so I wouldn't mind living there. We also heard great things about that hipster part of town whose name I forget.

We should probably combine forces somehow.

I hope they eventually expand too, but from what I gather the problems in NYC are vastly magnified because of a) how tight the market is due to height control restrictions on housing and b) the sheer cost of housing. I'm living in Tucson, AZ, right now and paying about $550 for a pretty nice one bedroom that would probably cost $2K in Manhattan and 1,400 in Brooklyn. If this one doesn't work out, I break the lease for $1,100, and although it sucks, I can find another place of similar quality relatively easily and am out a lot of money but not a catastrophic amount.

If I do the same in New York, I'm out a TON of money and have to do a lot of shopping, at least from what I understand.

Wasn't there a case of a tenant being sued for libel by the landlord for ranting on twitter or blog about something being wrong with the apartment?

Edit: Found the story. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/landlord-sue...