We’ve characterized Exit Strategy Realty as a scofflaw rental service in a post yesterday, and one the day before.
Exit Strategy Realty trains its new agents to lie in apartment ads. There’s no other way to describe what you’ll see and hear in the above YouTube video, one of a series created by Exit’s Jerome Bressler a/k/a Jerome Bresssert. We’ve previously referred to Bressler as Chicago’s sleaziest rental agent.
As you watch the video, continue to ask yourself what kind of a firm allows Jerome Bressler to train its new agents. As I watched this and other Bressler videos, I couldn’t help thinking that only a clownishly inept firm would allow the videos to be available to the public.
By way of background, Bressler is instructing new agents in the use of Zillow Rental Manager, formerly known as Postlets, a site that facilitates trashing multiple websites with repetitive ads. The reference to “Total Access” is to a system that Bressler has created to make it easier for agents to trash popular apartment rental websites with repetitive ads.
The video may be taken offline by the time you read this, so what follows is a partial transcript from approximately 0:35 to 3:25.
You want to make sure that everything’s checked here. These are all the syndications that the site’s going to syndicate to. Once you do one ad you’re going to be on all these different other sites.
“Email preferences.” Check that.
“Remind me to post to Craigslist.” We’ll go over that. So now hit “New Postlets,” and what I do is on Total Access I go down the list here.
I start here with One East Delaware. I did studio which I already have done, so I’m going to do a junior one-bedroom, and now the current price is $1,650.
So I’m going to type in “1 East Delaware” and then the address, Chicago, and it should start to come up. There it is. You just click on it and it will automatically put it in and it puts a little checkmark to the right.
Now, for unit number, every building has approximately, you know, between 20 you know 35 floors. Try to pick something in between. We’re not advertising the exact unit. Advertising the idea of a unit being available, so let’s put in like 2105. There’s typically 10 units per floor, so anything between 1 and 10 per floor would work.
Uh, this is for rent, so check for rent, hit “save and continue”
The next page is going to come up with a rent price, so I go back to Total Access and I usually have this printed off here. It says $1,650 so I’m going to go ahead and put in a little bit less. Right now we’re going into the winter months and so I’m going to put in $1,595 or 98. Just something a little bit less because they are changing prices every day in Chicago and you know in the winter months they get lower, so we move on.
Now, the available date you can put in, um if you do put in available date try to go out like a month from now. Um, so I’ll just put in the end of next month.
Rental terms. There’s nothing else to put in there. The property type is an apartment. Bedrooms is they don’t have anything for junior 1-bedroom, so I just put in 1-bedroom, 1-bath.
Square footage. We can go over this. The studios are right around between, you know, 500 to 550. Junior 1-bedrooms are 650 to 750. One-bedrooms are either 700 to 900, and 2-bedrooms are anywhere from 1,000 to 1,350 square feet.
So I’m gonna put in 700 square feet, which is actually at One East Delaware.
We have preserved an audio recording of the transcript portion of the video.
There’s more, in this video and others, but you get the picture. Exit Strategy Realty’s Bressler trains new agents to lie, and not pay strict attention to facts. New agents may not understand that rents can fluctuate both up and down in Chicago’s winter, especially when a low-priced unit is rented and only much higher-priced ones remain available. Renters who need an apartment on short notice may be cheated out of a good deal when a currently available apartment is advertised as available a month out.
As a renter, you need to know that the only safe way to avoid falling victim to a scofflaw rental service leasing agent is to avoid all Chicago rental services and work directly with properties. YoChicago’s apartment reviews and lists make it easy for you to find accurate info about apartments in sought-after lakefront neighborhoods.
Update 3/10/16: Exit Strategy Realty terminates scofflaw leasing agent