Edit: apparently I couldn't upload all 11 screenshots, but you get the gist…read more
TLDR: Moses is a nightmare to work with, bafflingly incompetent, and refused to rent an apartment to my Nigerian-American roommate and me and gave false and pretextual reasons for doing so.
I visited an apartment in the East Village with Moses. After talking it over with my two roommates, we decided that we wanted to apply for it. I let Moses know and asked him to send us the application. I had to ask him to send it two more times before he finally did--this probably should've been a warning sign that he wasn't actually interested in renting the apartment.
At the last minute, one of my two roommates dropped out because she decided that the 6th floor walkup would be too difficult with her asthma. My other roommate and I decided to go forward with the application anyway and to find someone else to sublet the third room. I assumed this would be no problem, since, even though our later conversations indicated that all three of us would be on the lease, Moses had told me when I visited the apartment that the landlord would only want two people on it. Plus, the third roommate was the only one without a guarantor and therefore the greatest risk of non-payment of rent. I sent in my half of the application, including the guarantor forms, and updated Moses on our roommate situation, asking him to add a clause permitting us to sublet to the lease.
He texted me about an hour after I sent in the materials saying that it "won't work." When I asked why, he cited our third roommate dropping out and the fact that my father, who's a lawyer, had "edited documents" (all he did was write that he was responsible for half the lease, since my roommate's guarantor would be responsible for the other half and we even offered to send it back unedited). But then, bizarrely, Moses offered to help me find a studio on my own, without my Nigerian-American roommate. A studio would cost at least as much as half of the rent of the apartment we were applying for and my father would still be a lawyer and still be my guarantor, so this offer made absolutely no sense--unless, of course, Moses's real issue was not any of the reasons he listed but rather with renting to my Nigerian-American roommate, whose financial information he never received.
My roommate like me, recently graduated from Columbia and was going to use her parents, both doctors, as guarantors. At the time Moses texted me, she had not yet submitted her half of the application because she was waiting for her mom to return from work to fill out the guarantor forms. Moses therefore had no reason to think she wouldn't be good for her half of the rent. All he knew about her was her Nigerian name.
To make matters worse, I noticed today that he had relisted the apartment, after previously taking it off the market. I checked the StreetEasy history, and he's listed the apartment 3 different times this month, each for slightly different prices and square footage. If I were the landlord, I would be pretty upset that my broker turned down people willing to pay $3500/month, only to relist the same apartment for $3200.
I've attached screenshots of my text conversation with Moses and the different listings for the apartment to this review for proof.