r/Zillow

Partner and I are looking at a nice single-family home in our area to rent. The price is reasonable but not exceptionally cheap. The landlord has been responsive, with no obvious typos or grammatical errors, and hasn't rushed us at all. If anything he's been very relaxed compared to most landlords we've interacted with! We have a tour of the place set up for tomorrow, he's sent us a lease to look over, and no money has exchanged hands. We even searched for other listings (this house isn't listed anywhere else) and looked up the tax records to find that this person's name matches.

However, what's setting off red flags for me is two-fold. He's asking for a 3-month lump payment towards rent at the start, moving to monthly afterwards. This isn't necessarily unreasonable, as my partner and I are grad students that get our income through lump loans each semester, and this was conveyed to him, so I can understand how he might want to verify we can consistently cover rent. Also, after initially setting up a time to meet, he moved it to the next day as he's "suddenly out of state" and is having "a very good friend" show us the house. Tax records show that he does in fact live in a different state, and he offered to facetime us during the visit and share his drivers license to confirm identification. He also has offered no personal information or way to contact him (other than through zillow) until we pressed for the ID.

I'm not sure what confirmation I could look for at this point, or what to ask him to use to verify, but if anyone has any ideas I would be glad for any input!

My boyfriend and I toured a townhome that was listed as pet friendly (illinois). The landlord loved us, we submitted an application which cost us $35 dollars each, we were told our application was stellar. We make well above 3x rent, my credit score is in the high 600s and my partner is in the mid 700 range. Then the landlord's daughter (this is what our realtor told us) threw a fit that we have a dog. Our dog is 7 years old and 30 pounds, and very well behaved

I'm so ticked that we wasted money on the application fee. The apartment was listed as pet friendly, we were told the down deposit for a pet fee, they were ready to send us a lease until the daughter "threw a fit".

Will zillow give us pur money back? We wouldn't have applied if it wasn't pet friendly, but it was literally listed as pet friendly on every site we checked. I'm additionally ticked to have given this apartment all our personally info and pay stubs.

Has anyone else noticed that the desktop Zillow map no longer shows neighboring home value labels? I only see price tags on active listings now. This makes it much harder to monitor neighborhood values without clicking every house. Is this a bug or a new feature?

There’s a blatantly fake listing in my area, I tried reporting it on the app by hitting Report Listing. That opens the generic Zillow help page. I searched Report Listing and the page about reporting fraudulent listings told me to fill out their contact form with a link to the listing. The contact form has no category for reporting a listing, just stuff for managing your own listing. I’ve never tried to report anything on Zillow before, is it just impossible?

I'm trying to sell my house as soon as possible. I've contacted SEVEN realtors and realtor teams on Zillow (a couple multiple times) and only ONE responded over the span of a MONTH. She saw the house and then hasn't responded in four days after she said she'd give me an estimate. Is there another site or something I can use that might have agents that actually do their job?