I recently had a landlord demand that I get a guarantor for signing a lease even though I make well over 40x the rent (the typical requirement). It's clearly because he (an elderly man) considers me (a young guy in my 20s) untrustworthy/unreliable.
Sorry, I don't understand how someone's choice of profession reflects on their ability to be a good tenant. Definitely not a reasonable excuse for snooping on someone's supposed Internet history. This is what leads to first come first serve regulations for rental applications.
Regarding your edit; a section of the people who browse Hacker News comments HATE landlords. Every comment I've seen from someone who has experience as one has seen a lot of downvotes. Even if they are just stating a fact or expanding on something.
Unless I missed something, it doesn't seem like the landlords were demanding this information. Is the worry that they might not consider you if you don't answer every question?
> I'm sure there are landlords that act in good faith as decent human beings, but it seems as if there's something unique about landlords that makes it difficult. In all the time I've been renting I've met a single decent property manager, and no decent land lords.
In reality it's just a random jackass on the internet that wanted to preen in front of others.
Introspection ... lmao. "I should figure out why I keep having to pull out my lawyer to keep landlords from abusing me".
In reality, it's because I rent cheap and they're used to having a power differential that doesn't exist with me.
Why the downvote? Because there are a few people who downvote anything negative for landlords on this board, and as we can see from the replies to this story, there are many landlords on hacker news.
And if that were the top complaint, that would be a great alarm to raise! That kind of thing is stupid and abusive. But they lead with "how dare they use an online resident portal and screen tenants". What?
I have one of those.
reply