It’s now your civic duty to snitch on landlords

At long last, a new dawn has arrived: after years of advocacy and flailing real estate industry attempts to block it, The FARE Act — short for Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses — officially went into effect yesterday. As is this case in pretty much every other city in the country, New York City landlords now have to pay their own damn broker fees, and renters won’t be saddled with the onerous upfront fee of 15% of an apartment’s annual rent (if you’re looking at a $2,500/month apartment, that would be a $4,500 broker fee, for instance.) Yes, we really needed a law to determine that it shouldn’t be your job to pay the commission of a person someone else hired to sell you something.

This is a hard-fought victory and extremely good news: a StreetEasy analysis estimated the new law will decrease the average upfront cost of a rental by 41.7%, which is no small thing given that sky-high upfront expenses often act as a barrier preventing people from finding steady housing in this city. What’s more, tenants are now given broad legal leeway — nay, encouragement! — to report landlords and brokers who are trying to skirt the new laws. 

Once again, we turn to CouncilMember Chi Ossé — who originally introduced the bill in early 2024 — to break it all down for you:

The basics of the law are as follows:

• No one can require you to hire or pay a broker in order to secure a rental (but you’re welcome to hire your own broker if you want to).
• Listings must state all fees up front (think credit checks, background checks and the like).
• Tenants must also be given an itemized list of fees, with descriptions, before they sign.
• Renters now have the right to sue in civil court if a landlord or broker violates their rights under the FARE Act. 

If a landlord or broker so much as requests a fee from you, report them to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection here, and they’ll be fined. But one point in this video particularly stood out to us: a landlord or broker doesn’t have to be bothering you directly in order for you to report them. If you see something shady while passively browsing listings, you’ve got full rights to snitch.

And this is no idle need! Everyone is still trying to get a handle on what this new rental ecosystem will look like, and on the landlord and broker’s end, what they can get away with. (There are also questions of whether the current fines are really high enough to be a deterrent from bad behavior, meaning that it’s extra important for bad actors to get a high volume of complaints if we really want to hit their wallets where it hurts.)

The NYCapartments subreddit is already awash with screenshots of suss language from new listings, tactics like advertising a choice between paying a broker fee or agreeing to a higher overall monthly rent (against the new law), or trying to rope renters into hiring them as a tenant’s broker when they’re likely already working for the landlord (also against the new law). 

If you see something shady while passively browsing listings, you’ve got full rights to snitch.

If you’re cruising listings and see something like this, take screenshots and report it! Yes, this is one of the highly specific instances where we encourage some civic-minded snitching. We’re still in the earliest days of this exciting new thing, and much remains to be seen about how well this is enforced, and what, if any, ripple effects it has on the world of rentals. 

Inevitably, some landlords are seeing if they can get away with large rent increases to offset the cost of the fees, per WSJ, while some are offering multi-year (but still more expensive) leases to avoid having to deal with brokers as often. (For what it’s worth, that same StreetEasy analysis we mentioned earlier found asking prices for rentals that have dropped the broker's fees haven’t risen much beyond normal market rates.) Other landlords are planning to skip brokers altogether moving forward, either listing units themselves or relying on word of mouth, Curbed reports. For the moment, listing sites have seen an almost-certainly-temporary dip in listings.

There’s a lot we don’t have control over in this housing market, to put it mildly. But one thing we absolutely can do is make sure landlords and brokers feel the full force of what it means for them to break these new laws, laws that were put in place to reduce barriers to housing and put even the smallest dent in our spiraling homelessness and housing crises. So go ahead: start snitching.

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