She scored a 2-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn at 60% below market — but paid $4,000 just to see it. Secret listings give renters an edge at a cost

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.