voberoi

You are right that the landlord can't just raise the rent to make up for the loss of this one time payment unless the market will accommodate it.

I am not arguing that it will end up in the rent. I was only arguing that, if it did, that would still be a better arrangement.

However, you are wrong that the service provided by the fee offers no value, and that the fee will not end up somewhere (even in a diminished way).

- To landlords it offers upfront vetting, no required face time with prospects, and less work to land a tenant. We have a 1.4% vacancy rate in NYC -- apartments on the market will have hundreds of interested people and multiple applications. Landlords basically manage none of this.

- To prospective renters who actively hire a broker -- and these do exist, I did this once -- it offers zero time on the prospect's part to look for, schedule, and research units. You tell the broker your parameters, they will do the research, and then set up a multi-hour tour of apartments.

(Unless you are only looking at no-fee apartments, you are better off just hiring a broker so you get at least some value from it if you rent a fee-ful apartment)

The value the fee provides to the people who care about it, will end up somewhere. This work doesn't go away. Many landlords and prospective renters will take on the work themselves, but many won't.

These people will pay for the broker fee. Those broker fees end up with the landlord or the prospective renter.

It is not my conclusion that eliminating the broker fee will result in higher rent. I think what will happen is:

- The broker market will shrink.

- Some landlords or renters will pay for it.

In a nutty housing market like NYC's, there is actual value provided by brokers, to some people.

Finally -- to be clear, I'm not arguing against the FARE Act. I am fully supportive of it and wish this happened years ago.

Easily $4K+

The fee will end up somewhere.

If it's in the rent, it's better to amortize the cost of the broker fee over a year vs. pay upfront.

Between the fee + first month's rent + security deposit (+ sometimes an additional month's rent) it is common to have to front 10K - 20K just to get into an apartment here.

> "I have a dream" doesn't derive its power from any law King helped pass, but from how it reorganized our relationship with possibility.

---

MLK was an incredible organizer whose work helped get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Acts passed.

That isn't a "facade". They're real policy and that is his legacy. His words don't take on mythical status without those significant accomplishments.

Not only is this article poorly-written and hard to parse with pointless sentences like "We are all legislators in the parliament of consciousness", the author's entire premise is wrong.

I hope people don't actually think this way. Activists, organizers, and politicians aren't just Jungian symbols or "cultural vibes".

The policies they fight for, organize around, and enact actually cause things to happen -- for better or worse.

I know the market you are targeting with your product plug and the problems you point out are real challenges that businesses have.

But the lack of all of these features is what I absolutely love about Heroku Dataclips and products inspired by it. It does "run SQL on my DB and give me a shareable chart" more easily and effectively than any BI tool I've ever used.

It's such an incredible mini-product that made Heroku Postgres a joy to use (when I used to use Heroku), and what makes me excited about something like Blazer.

It's open-source Heroku Dataclips (one of my favorite products ever)!

I haven't used Blazer, but I have followed and love the idea behind this project.

If folks have used it here, I'd love to hear from them.