ALTA NYC

These guys are very shady. Be careful. Went through an ordeal and paid way too much in broker fees. These guys will demand a commitment and money. They drive you to an ATM and then the office to sign. Omar didn’t help at all after we paid and would not answer calls or emails. He wouldn’t let us speak to the landlord until we were less than a week from when we needed to move in.

These guys are very sketchy.
They showed me an OK apartment, but pressured me like used car salesmen. For example, I told the guy I was pressed for time and he said no problem, I’ll just drive you to my office, it’s «right over there». It ended up being a loooong drive in rush hour.
Then he marched me to two ATMs to put together a $ 500 cash deposit. At the time I didn’t know how abnormal that was. The apartment seemed OK, and I was unemployed, so I still applied. It was a little «too good to be true» — the landlord only asked for a month’s extra security for an unemployed tenant.
Then it went from used car salesman to outright shady. They called the next day to tell me lease signing had to be that day — even though it was Saturday and the banks were closed (oops).
The killer was that they didn’t want to accept a cashier’s check for the broker’s fee. Apparently the landlord was fine with a cashier’s check (to a personal name, not a company), but they wanted either a wire transfer or several grand in actual bills. Craigslist has a warning on every apartment search page about people who do that, namely that they’re probably running a scam.
I told them screw that, and they grudgingly agreed to accept a cashier’s check… made out to a company called ZealEstate. Note their offices say Alta NYC, their paperwork says Alta NYC, and yet they came up with a story that they’d changed the company name and closed the Alta NYC bank account.
I told Omar I wanted my deposit back and he gave it back. However, he was resentful and unprofessional the whole time, which pretty much guaranteed I’d remember to write this review.

They say that brokers are a bunch of shadesters, but I didn’t expect my first time negotiating a brokered housing situation to justify this generalization.
Saw a pretty sweet looking back-​facing studio space on Craigslist, shown empty. There was no disclaimer saying that it was a stock photo of a similar unit.
The Alta guy (who will go unnamed and is not one of the others named in others’ reviews below) was super responsive via email and had no problem just setting a time and date to meet when I informed him that I am cell-​less.
He wasn’t there on the dot, but soon appeared from around the corner. The unit was still inhabited and full of some girl’s sloppiness and college dorm décor. I asked him random questions about the fire escape, pest control, et cetera, and he answered them lackadaisically, while also taking a couple phone calls while I poked around the space. He also said that if the tenant moved out right at the end of May and I moved in on June 1^st, the landlord wouldn’t clean the place since there would be no time.
He told me that the broker fee was 18% of annual rent. In so many words, I told him to fuck that noise, and he brought it down to 10% pretty damn fast, but acting like he was really pushing the limits.
He drove me in an old folks type of sedan to a B of A ATM from which I withdrew a deposit (since it supposedly had to be cash only). Then, we arrived at a small office with a nice floor in a crummy neighborhood. At a nearby desk, two men had a discussion in Hindi, while in a glass window office, a dude wit dreads yawned, apparently idle. Another dude with nothing to do simply stared at me while I waited for mt receipt to be printed.
The guy then started pressuring me to sign the lease (even if there was a month to go and I’d already thrown down my own cash money as a sign of commitment. When I said I had to go away, he said that was fine, and to email him my stubs, etc.
I did this and initiated my rental application for a fee of $ 40. While out of town, I called about three times until the agent finally answered with the news that somehow, between 4 p.m. and 7 p. m, someone else had put down a deposit on the same place, and that «the person with the higher income will probably get it.»
He assured me that my deposit would be returned, but asked if I’d consider having my application transferred to a suddenly available upstairs front-​facing unit that was supposedly the same. I said hell yes, and he said he’d let the landlord know, then let me know.
This is where things fell apart. He suddenly became unreachable by phone and e-​mail. The first time he responded was to say that the landlord wasn’t responding, but not to worry because it was just the weekend. The second time was on a Monday past 1 p.m. — groggily, he said that he hadn’t had the «chance» to check in with the landlord. Then, I called and wrote a hundred more times to find out that the landlord rejected my application on the sheer basis of my past rent (hello, I was subletting with two roommates!!). This is how my naïve ass found out that, in this city, you have to pretty much write all the right lies to land the apartments you deserve.
A lot of this was arguably the landlord’s perogative, but the broker didn’t advocate for me very much, though he seemed chummy with the guy (he’d mentioned earlier that the rent price-​not that low-​was a «special deal» he’d worked out with the owner). He gave a rousing speech about how he didn’t get paid if I didn’t get the place, but I’m sure he had someone on hand who’d agreed to pay his bogus 18%. In fact, there’s no proof that he didn’t make up the whole landlord story because I still saw no financial or other basis for my rejection. I had no time to challenge the decision or I might have… but ultimately, I found a better place for cheaper through a better broker, so it’s all good.
Of course, Alta kept my app fee, though they should have just returned it with the rest, since THEY mistakenly double booked the original apartment, then signed me up for another place that they must have known I wouldn’t get since it was more important to them to mark it up for some schmuck who would pay it (ability to pay was not the issue).
The second star is only because he gave me a copy of my credit report fot future use — but this after I wrote a few ominous e-​mails.
If you are even slightly neurotic or just plain invested in your housing situation, this agency might give you an ulcer just from plain lack of communication and concern right when it matters most. Take your money elsewhere, even if you’re scoping for a boheme den in the BK.
And again for the record, brokers’ fees should be 15% tippity top, and you should always bargain them down. Anyone with an initial qquote higher than that is a highway robber.

STAY AWAY. Omar is unreliable, untrusthworthy, and lazy.

These guys represented several apartments that I found through Craigslist. I worked with three different brokers, Carlos, Naveed, and Omar. Naveed and Omar were downright rude. Carlos was not rude at all, but was fairly lazy, and didnt even bother to tell me about other very similar units he had, same price range and just down the street, until I found them myself on Craigslist. In addition, of the four apartments that I looked at with them, two were something of roach-​holes, and one was decent. One apartment, the last one I looked at with them (all of which I found on my own on Craigslist), with actually pretty nice, but the previous gross apartments and rude agents left me with a bad taste in my mouth,