Occupry your next lease to negotiate a better deal
79 comments
·March 17, 2025keiferski
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.
kulahan
Curious what your retirement plan looks like…
phonon
Small Claims Court would only take a few weeks
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!
null
lollollollollol
I know Occupry is only one letter different than Occupy and that is clever; maybe pry has connotation with leveraging a deal. But, I’m a Gen X’r. I grew up with a lot of Jerry Lewis and cartoons featuring Asian slurs where L’s were replaced by R’s, and this is too close to that for me, even if there’s no L in Occupy to replace. Even if I didn’t associate it with racism, the name just looks like a mistake. I don’t want to unfairly criticize something that’s gotten this far, but it may not be too late to consider a name change. It looks like a great product, so I didn’t want to just sit by and watch it suffer because of the name.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
null
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.
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.
Carrok
This is just adorable. To think that prospective renters have any negotiating power at all when the landlord typically (in my area anyway) receives triple digit numbers of applications.
aegypti
Landlords in my area are begging for occupants and throwing move in promos at you when you walk in the door because the city allowed new housing to be built in excess after a massive spike in demand during the pandemic
colechristensen
My local landlords just leave buildings mostly empty on a hope and prayer that some day high rent will be desired again, and no doubt as the basis for some kind of tax scam or financing requirement.
The “move in promos” should be illegal as they use them as ways to strip you of rights and never lower rent for market prices.
JumpCrisscross
> to think that prospective renters have any negotiating power at all when the landlord typically (in my area anyway) receives triple digit numbers of applications
For new-lease negotiation, you're right. For renewal, in my experience, New York City landlords happily made small edits if given a good reason. (While the larger companies usually can't change their boilerplate documents, they're almost always fine adding a rider.)
bdangubic
100% this
bastardoperator
Sounds more like losing out on the place you wanted because they rented it to someone that didn't haggle them.
michaelmrose
Your are correct in your conclusion that individuals dealing with corporations have little power to negotiate terms but incorrect in your reasoning. This is the same fallacy as claiming there are dozens of people willing to do any given job when the number of dwellings and jobs is nearly equal those willing to occupy or work.
Because landlords and especially jobs may receive many applications and review relatively few applicants are often obliged to submit many applications leading to many applications for each job but not many applicants for each job.
The most obvious cause is not merely selectivity but the desire to leave the job app/dwelling listed until the process is fully complete and listings which already have a pre-selected applicants but which are listed for legal reasons.
In fact the sector is most often only actually spoiled for choice only when offering something that is fundamentally a better deal than the price as in any other market even when the factors are intangibles that aren't factored into the price like competent management and good neighbors.
That is to say that given 6 tenants and 6 landlords all 6 landlords may say they have 5 other tenants competing for the spot only if they all count the same tenants and those offering undesirable terms even at the same price will find they have to settle on average for less desirable tenants.
Then they can all go online and complain that all tenants are terrible and talk about how it took 6 months to dig the non-paying tenant out like a tick.
Der_Einzige
Are you kidding me? Most laws in liberal cities where this might be true are so tenant skewed that I downright don't want the risk of them doing the "squat and take 6+ months to be evicted but not before trashing the place" routine. No thank you. I'll be a landlord in some red state where I can rely on the power of rich capitalists to make sure that squatters spend their time in jail/prison instead of moving onto yet another owner to fleece.
That's just adorable - to think that landlords have power in a place like Seattle or Portland or SF.
kube-system
You both are talking about two different types of power. You're talking about tenancy rights, the parent was talking about contract negotiation power. In many big cities, tenants have a good number of rights after they've signed a contract and become a tenant. But they still have little power to negotiate the contract before they have become one.
kmeisthax
And this is why I don't touch the real estate market. Renting out housing is an inherently adversarial relationship; you either screw over your tenants or they screw over you. There's no fair exchange of value, there's just the scalper (e.g. Blackrock) who bought all the Pokemon cards^W^Whousing units and thus controls the supply, versus the tenant who wants to kick them in the shins.
Personally, I don't think any of the "tenants rights" laws are actually fit for purpose. That is, they're designed to bribe the peasants into accepting their landlords. My ideal would be cities with complete bans on housing rental - i.e. a 100% owner-occupancy mandate - along with "HOUSING PRINTER GO BRRRR" strategies to completely obviate most demand for renting housing units.
rcxdude
There are reasons for rental apart from "can't afford to buy". If you don't want to/can't commit to staying in one place for >5 years then rental is often a better option from sheer practicality. And if house prices aren't going through the roof because there's adequate supply, it's not necessarily a better financial option either.
(basically, renting isn't the problem, lack of supply of housing is, and abusive rental markets are a symptom)
happyopossum
> Renting out housing is an inherently adversarial relationship; you either screw over your tenants or they screw over you.
Hasn’t been my experience on either end of the relationship.
renewiltord
Institutions only own some half a million single family homes. Blackstone only owns some 300k units in total. The supply is constrained by locals who want to "preserve community character" and environmentalists who want to "prevent gentrification" and "preserve views".
JumpCrisscross
Most tenants negotiating renewal aren't going to squat. The leverage a renewing tenant has is the information asymmetry in the new-tenant market (landlord might sub out an on-time rent payer for a squatter) and friction of establishing a new lease. That's preserved in red states and blue.
michaelmrose
Wherein it takes 6 months is is virtually always the case that it is because the court is too overburdened to handle the affair in a timely fashion. This is likely the case because the system must allocate resources that it should likely prefer handle criminal matters of vastly greater import which is already criminally slow. The result getting a fraction of a singular county judges time and joining a months long queue.
This slowness of process is in fact a self reinforcing loop. Wherein it's possible to join a 6 month queue it makes sense for poor folks to do so. They might be able to get caught up or find adequate housing elsewhere. It can also even makes sense that that point to stop paying. If you fall $1000 behind and it is expected to take $3000 to move. If you should find it unlikely to be able to make up the $1000 in 30 days time and eviction should become inevitable but 6 months down the line.
At that point what is the logical thing? Should you continue to pay monthly as before but never catching up and find yourself living in a cardboard box in 6 months OR should you stop paying now and use the money to move in a few months.
The best resolution possible is to incentivize landlords to accept payment plans to bring tenants up to date whilst allowing resolution in 30-90 days wherein this isn't possible or reasonable. For instance when the tenant is damaging the property or otherwise violating the lease and can't be brought into compliance.
This aligns incentives. By agreeing to a payment plan the tenant is incentivized to make the landlord whole and the landlord is incentivized not to thrust the tenants family into the street lest he lose the expectation of repayment of the funds.
Because it isn't entirely objectionable from either side unlike losing 6 months of rent or homelessness we needn't fight a pointless legal battle over it. If it be the inevitable result of legal action the landlord will simply present it to the tenant as an option rather than pay a lawyer a substantial sum to find themselves on the same road.
The alternative imposes a very high cost on society in terms of human suffering and in fact monetarily because it spends a tidy sum per homeless person.
Lastly a squatter is someone who breaks into a property and sets up shop. Someone who lawfully enters into an agreement to live somewhere and ultimately fails to live up to their side of the obligation isn't a squatter and even in the red states hasn't committed a crime. They are a lawful resident until the eviction is fully processed and even should they outstay the judges order they will be removed by the police not processed into prison.
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"
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.)
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.