Eastern Pennsylvania apartment and home rental seekers, please do not use the Rental Pros services.
Anyone looking for apartments and rental homes in the Lehigh Valley(Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton) or Philadelphia area, beware of using the company known as The Rental Professionals (aka The Rental Pros.). I, as well as many others, were burned by this company. I wasted countless time not only investigating their terrible listings but also trying to get their 'guaranteed' refund after unsuccessfully finding an apartment or home rental in Pennsylvania. Since the birth of this site I've been contacted by many more who also had a terrible experience and my aim is to spare some of you the wasted time, energy and money.
I will outline a number of issues that users of this service have come across.
The Rental Pros run rental listings in many local pennsylvania news papers (morning call - mcall.com, pocono record - poconorecord.com, philadelphia weekly - philadelphiaweekly.com) but the apartments they advertise don't seem to exist. For example, they'll advertise a 3 bedroom apartment in west allentown for $800 but when you call they give you a run around. See this site for one persons experience with their
bait and switch.
The Rental Pros require you to sign up for the service to get information on the listings they advertise in the newspaper classifieds. Mysteriously those listings do not exist in the list of rentals they supply you. If you call to ask about a specific ad they tell you the home has already been rented.
You give the Rental Pros your criteria, but they send you listings that don't meet that criteria. In our case we specified that we need a place that allows dogs, yet a number of the apartment and home rental listings we called from the list told us they do not allow pets. When questioned about this The Rental Professionals claim that their list is based on what the landlord tells them, however, it still amounts to the same thing, a useless list. Why us The Rental Pros if they're listings provide no more information than you'll find in the local paper? They're listings are unorganized and have little valuable information within them. You will end up making just as many phone calls and doing just as much leg work as you would by calling adds in the local paper.
The Rental Pros have poor customer service. The professional part of the Rental Professionals does not exist. They are very nice to you when they give you the initial sales pitch and want to take your money. However if you call with any issue, the Rental Pros will quickly get rude and condescending. The Rental Pros are NOT real estate agents, or any sort of licensed professional. They merely solicit listings from people renting apartments.
Many people on the Rental Pros listings had placed their own ads in the paper. You won't miss anything by not signing up for the service. The Rental Pros provide no 'exclusive listings'. We called a number of ads in the paper only to find that we'd talked to the person before when calling listings on the rental pros list. Many of the places found in newspaper had the rental listed for less money than the same rental home found on the Rental Pros listings. So you actually stand to spend less money by NOT USING the Rental Professionals.
Most of the rental homes and apartments in the Rental Pros list are awful. Despite what they may tell you on the phone they do not screen the listings. We were looking in the $800 - $900 dollar range for a rental in the Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton area of the Lehigh Valley, but many of the things we found were not worth near what they were listed for. INFACT, as we stated above, some of these places were listed in the newspaper privately for less money!
As I stated above, the listings are inaccurate and often misleading. Small apartments surprisingly don't have a square footage listed. Many of the 'homes' listed were in fact mobile homes, not houses for rent. Because the Rental Pros do not charge landlords for being listed in the service they seem to attract really cheap landlords, the same cheap landlords that won't spend a dime to keep up their property, when visiting some of the listings this became obvious. We found more rentals of better quality when using the local newspapers.
The company has had a number or reports filed against them with the local Better Business Bureau(bbb.org). I'm among those who've filed a complaint against the rental professionals.
The Rental Pros talk about their 'guaranteed refund' policy should you not find a home. Well, regardless of how hard you try you are unlikely to get a refund. They make you jump through hoops to the point where you'll want to give up. Even if you don't give up by time you're done with the runaround your time has 'expired' for getting the refund. So in short you'll be very unlikely to get any refund from the Rental Pros. It turns out all refund requests are routed to a separate office which has no phone or fax number. When you call the main office for an update it always shows that your refund is 'processing' in the system. Update: After 8 months of constant nagging, we finally received a refund. I was very persistent, everyone who's contacted me regarding their experience has claimed they did not gotten any money back.
If you enjoy being called an idiot, or want someone to threaten to rip up any paperwork you send for your refund, speak to Jared Zedan. It's customer service at its best. Everyone who has a complaint with this company has dealt with Jared and all had similar experiences.
If anyone has a similar experience to report or just feels like dropping me a line please email me at tpratt4321@yahoo.com
