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Alexandra Dye just rented a two-bedroom in Brooklyn for 60% below what the market says it’s worth.
She found it through a broker who wouldn’t show her anything until she promised him a fee, which was $4,000 by the time she signed her lease.
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Dye, 29, works in advertising, and her deal started with a rejection. She’d asked about an apartment on StreetEasy, Bloomberg reported. That unit was taken, the broker told her, but he had others provided she agreed to a fee: a month’s rent or more on any apartment she rented through him.
Similar pitches have been making the rounds: Some agents now advertise their off-market inventory on TikTok and Instagram, and one video touring a $6,500-a-month one-bedroom in the Financial District drew 50 inquiries, Bloomberg reported.
Behind it all is the city’s broker fee ban, which turned a year old in June. Since the law landed, listings have been disappearing from public sites, and some brokers have turned the shortage into a business, selling renters access to apartments that never surface in a search.
The broker fee ban pushed listings off public sites
The Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses (FARE) Act took effect on June 11, 2025, making the party who hires a broker also the party who pays for one. Since the brokers listing those apartments are typically working for the landlords, most renters stopped paying anything at all. Rental platform Openigloo found the share of renters covering a broker fee dropped to 15% from 31% since the law took effect.
Available apartments have also trailed year-earlier levels every month since the FARE Act, with this June down 31%, according to appraisal firm Miller Samuel and The Real Deal — in a normal year, June inventory rises 5.9%.
Brokers have also found business in all those unlisted apartments. Bloomberg reported that Peyton Yen of Charney Brokerage charges one month’s rent for what she called a pre-market advantage, and that roughly half of the 15 or so leases she expects to sign this summer involve apartments no major listing site will ever carry.
Yen told Moneywise that fee applies only when a renter hires her as their agent and signs a lease through her, that pre-market listings she shares for landlord clients carry no renter fee and that the roughly-half figure referred to leases completed before apartments reached the portals — not renters paying for access.
“Pre-market marketing for my landlord clients and renter-paid representation are two separate arrangements,” Yen emphasized.
Renters who pay are getting access to cheaper apartments
For anyone hunting on the open market, the numbers keep getting uglier. Manhattan’s median rent hit an all-time high of $5,295 in June, while Brooklyn’s reached a record $4,350, according to Corcoran’s monthly market report. And upward of a quarter of the leases signed in Manhattan in June followed a bidding war, per Miller Samuel and The Real Deal.
Off-market units, on the other hand, are renting at a growing discount. Openigloo’s numbers show rent-regulated apartments advertised publicly once cost about 3% more than off-market units, and that spread now runs 18%. Which is how Dye could hand over more than two months’ rent in fees and still finish ahead — nothing at her apartment’s price was ever going to reach her search results.
When charging for access breaks the law
Paying your own broker is perfectly legal, including one hired specifically to dig up apartments that never go public. The line falls at brokers using a particular apartment as leverage to make someone hire them. Advertise a unit, tell the caller it’s spoken for, then steer them toward fee-bearing apartments instead, and the city calls it an illegal bait-and-switch. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office set out its broader crackdown on illegal broker fees in the Rental Ripoff Report, released in July.
Dye’s search followed that sequence exactly: a public listing, word that it was gone, then a fee agreement standing between her and anything else. Experts told Bloomberg her experience violated the FARE Act.
The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection has written more than 79 summonses over FARE Act violations as of July 2026. If a broker pulls this on you, file a complaint through 311 or DCWP’s website — and keep screenshots of everything.
The DCWP agency didn’t immediately respond to Moneywise’s request to confirm those figures.
Dye herself had spent two months on the open market — scam listings, one landlord walking at the last second — before this broker named his price. By then, she was ready to pay.
“I do think I got an amazing deal,” Dye told Bloomberg. “But I still felt a little taken advantage of.”
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This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: She scored a two-bedroom apartment in prime Brooklyn at 60% below market — but had to fork over $4,000 just to see it
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