Occupry your next lease to negotiate a better deal
89 comments
·March 17, 2025keiferski
qingcharles
A late response to this, but my friend was having problems getting her deposit back and I did exactly this (with help from GPT to find the statute) and had her text it to the landlord. 5 mins later the deposit was in her Cash App.
idiotsecant
That is a satisfying story but it makes me wish you stuck it to the landlord, as they're almost certainly doing that to every tenant and making a killing. I get that court takes time and everything, I just want to hear a story that ends in justice!
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beefnugs
Huh???? do the tiny amount of paperwork and get the double, he won't learn until he feels the pain, you are not helping anyone with this choice
nh23423fefe
But I dont want double in 3 years. I want what I'm owed today.
anon373839
In reality, something like this wouldn't take you 3 years. However, I can't fault you for not wanting to go into court pro se; it's not a good position to be in.
Interestingly, in some jurisdictions, provisions like these also carry attorney's fees to the prevailing tenant (i.e., asymmetric fee-shifting). So your landlord would be facing exposure to not only the underlying deposit and penalty and their own attorney's fees, but also possibly yours as well.
phonon
Small Claims Court would only take a few weeks
kulahan
Curious what your retirement plan looks like…
keiferski
I was twenty-something and in college, and just wanted my $300 back. I really didn't want to get involved with the courts.
ziddoap
Any time an AI product is advertised with something like "Legal Research Agents", a shiver goes up my spine.
I see the testimonials (though, I don't put much faith in "Jane Doe" and "Mike Smith" testimonials), however I'm pretty sure in my area anyone who attempts to negotiate (especially based on an AI-built argument) will be told to pound sand.
It's not a great market for renters here. Even blatantly illegal clauses are openly advertised all the time.
I could maybe see a use case for checking a current lease (for illegal clauses and such), rather than when trying to start a lease.
Terr_
> Any time an AI product is advertised with something like "Legal Research Agents"
In most cases a more-accurate label would be "Emotional-support Bullshitter", because:
1. Since nobody on the user's side really knows if a provided fact is true or a rationale is legally coherent, that makes it a kind of "bullshit".
2. It's main benefit is to make the human feels more confident and safe in negotiations, being able to foist responsibility onto their digital accomplice, it supports them emotionally.
3. It sounds like "emotional-support animal", and this is amusing to me while alluding to another kind of misbehavior.
neilv
> (though, I don't put much faith in "Jane Doe" and "Mike Smith" testimonials)
If I got a great testimonial, and the person's name was Jane Doe, I would be sad, because people who read it would think I was a liar.
Der_Einzige
"Spine shivers" are one of the most extreme tells of AI slop. Not that I think you used AI to generate this - but such terms are now poisoned.
Terr_
> extreme tells
It's not a "tell" if it has no predictive value. Most things popular in output are that way because they were already popular--or possibly hackneyed--in inputs. I'm pretty cynical when it comes to LLM overhyping, but mimicking forms and styles written text is one of the things they actually do well.
Even if you see something odd like "adumbration" (vague foreshadowing) you're still stuck distinguishing between (A) a human trying to sound a certain way and reaching for a thesaurus vs (B) someone setting up an LLM prompt to try to mimic the first kind of person.
ziddoap
This is ridiculous.
Can I to say that? Or do you have a list of allowable words.
Der_Einzige
Anything not on this list is fine!
https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler/blob/main/slop...
neilv
> I'm pretty sure in my area anyone who attempts to negotiate (especially based on an AI-built argument) will be told to pound sand.
That said, given the evils of RealPage YieldStar, and of investors hoovering up residential real estate, it would be nice to find a way to give some power back to the people.
(Normally, this could be through law enforcement and legislation, but that became more complicated in the last couple months.)
One tech-based service that would help, in a small way, is a widely-used reviews and reputation system for landlords and properties. It would have to be reputable (unlike Yelp), and to find some way to sustain itself, long-term, without turning evil.
soared
This needs a sample lease and sample outputs - I’ve really got no idea what it could do to negotiate a lease, etc. but agreed with other comments - landlords on my area would likely just tell you to leave if you tried any redlines.
ccppurcell
No information about who owns this company. Given that it is very likely run by, in effect, landlords, I would be extremely suspicious of any advice it would give me as a tenant.
gruez
>Given that it is very likely run by, in effect, landlords
Why?
ccppurcell
Can you imagine a large investor who isn't, to some extent, invested in real estate?
dullcrisp
My real estate attorney thankfully lives under a bridge.
JumpCrisscross
> Given that it is very likely run by, in effect, landlords
You’re correct in being sceptical of services that ask you to upload sensitive documents. But the specific allegation seems unsubstantiated in this case.
You pay for the product. The privacy policy and terms of use are readable and reasonable. And they both have someone’s contact information at the bottom. No obvious red flags.
ccppurcell
But you have no idea of the prompt. The money will ultimately go to people who are almost certainly invested in real estate. I make no allegations, but I would not ask any landlord for advice on which terms of my contract to negotiate/flag as illegal.
colechristensen
Negotiate? I’ve had two kinds of landlord, faceless corporations that regularly changed completely without anybody noticing where you could never talk to anyone who could actually negotiate, it was just whatever the computer spit out…
And “some guy” for whom the terms of the contract were mostly suggestions protected by the fact that tenants were too busy or poor to pursue legal recourse to the point of a solution.
throwaway638637
There is still a Jane Doe testimonial up, which makes me distrust the rest of them
rapind
Interesting that a testimonial from a real Jane or John Doe is actually a negative.
whalesalad
Great idea. I think that the marketing page is too tech-y. It's got way too many details, uses terms like agents etc. The average joe doesn't know or care what an ai agent is, and it's not gonna help sell your product.
I would focus less on verbose feature lists and pivot to some real world examples reflecting the capabilities of the tool. This person saved $150/mo, this person was able to keep their pet, etc.
Best thing you could do is ditch the enter your email blob and instead allow a user to upload their PDF/doc lease and then give them a teaser/sample of what they have in store if they proceed. "we found 3 issues with your lease, 2 laws being broken, 1 fee that is illegal, etc"
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mock-possum
Neat idea, I wish there was some sort of demo or cases study to read through though - I really get turned off by these product billboard sites that are basically just funnel users into a CRM, or into marketing emails / video chats.
I just want to see what your product can do, not hear you tell me about it.
(I say this even though the company I’m working for relies on exactly these means to acquire new customers.)
prats226
SEO and UX feedback: All the headers and H1/H2 tags are black in color with dark blue background making text unreadable
spondyl
I came here to say this too. I assume the developer only uses dark mode and didn't test light mode.
zelias
Why is this flagged?
epidemiology
You'll get a lot of haters from the petite bourgeoisie tech landlord crowd here but this is a good idea. The more tools to help renters negotiate against the countless predatory landlords the better. Even better would be ways to report or put their malfeasance on public record. $9 is too expensive though.
kube-system
I think the subset of landlords that will negotiate, and the ones that you need AI to help you with, are pretty small in overlap.
There are typically two experiences in negotiation with landlords, at least in the US:
* You rent from a small time landlord, where you're talking to the guy who owns the property. They'll negotiate if you talk to them like a human being. (and if the rental market is not very hot in that area)
* You rent from MegaCorp. The leasing agent was hired off of indeed.com last week and has zero power to negotiate and will likely tell you "sorry the lease and prices are set by corporate"
bdangubic
it is a great idea - in theory. in practice I do not think this holds water. price is reasonable, I am landlord and I ran my current lease through it and also through few others and it is worth the price.
the main issue here is that this might only work in small markets and landlords like me, “just a guy.” for any property owned by large corporations (the percentage of these is increasing by the minute across the country) this is not useful. even for someone like me, last time my condo was on the market I have received 73 applications. someone tries to negotiate too much I’d just move on to the next if the negotiation is not reasonable
This is great. In my experience the single biggest thing that allows landlords to take advantage of tenants is the inaccessibility of real estate law. Anything that makes contract terms more easily understandable is a win, as far as I’m concerned.
Linking to a comment I made about dealing with this:
…one time a landlord didn't return the security deposit. I called him, messaged him, left notes in his mailbox. No reply. One month, two months went by. So, I looked up the relevant legal code, found the part that said "landlords have 30 days to return the security deposit with any deductions listed. Failure to do so results in the landlord owing the tenant double the original amount with no deductions." I printed that out, highlighted the relevant section, and mailed him a letter saying that he can return the original deposit amount to me immediately, or I will file at the local court and he'll owe me double. I got a check in the mail two days later.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35760541
Having an app point this statue out when signing a contract would be great.