You Get What You Pay For With Craigslist

When it comes to apartments for rent, craigslist is NOT the place to look.

The details are always a little different, but the substance of the story is always the same; young and new to the city, the victim uses craigslist to find an apartment for rent. It’s free, so it’s a bargain, right?

Lesson 1: Free does not mean it’s a bargain. Free can be very costly.

Kathy Horn and her roommates rented an apartment at 723 St. Nicholas Avenue from Jensi Flornentino for $4,000 per month. Turns out, Jensi Florentino doesn’t own the apartment or the building. He had no right to rent the apartment. Kathy and her roommates are out of the apartment, but have not been able to get their deposit back. But that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is, in the words of the NY Daily News’s Denis Hamil;

“The rent included utilities,” Horn says. “Then the street locks broke. Bringing scary loiterers. We had roaches. Water leaks. Mold the size of mushrooms growing on the walls. The washer broke, causing flooding. It went unrepaired. I started getting bitten by what I thought were mosquitoes. I bought screens.”

Elszasz and Lin confirm all this.

After five weeks of pestering Florentino to no avail, Horn called 311 and the city made the management company fix the locks. The tenants say on cold days they had little heat.

“On Nov. 2 Jensi moved out, and rented his room to a guy from Italy,” says Horn. “That day a Con Ed worker warned me we were scheduled for a non-payment disconnect. Time Warner cable/internet was shut off twice.”

Horn called the management company. “I learned that not only didn’t Jensi own the apartment but that it was rented to a Jensi Tejada, not Florentino. And they said our subleases were illegal.”

By Thanksgiving, Horn and her roommates were still getting bitten by “mosquitoes.”

“On Dec. 2, 2011 I woke up from a bug biting my hand,” she said. “I caught it and preserved it in Scotch Tape.”

When an exterminator came that morning to spray for roaches Horn showed him the bug. “He told me it was a huge bedbug,” she says. “Advanced in stage, which meant an infestation.”

Horn says she soon learned that the apartment had been inadequately treated in March just once instead of with follow-up visits.