Confessions of a Part-Time Leasing Agent

I’m pretty apathetic about my job. During the fall, I’m pretty busy leasing out apartments. I’m no salesperson, I’m not what most people would expect from a leasing agent, I just tell people about the apartments and sometimes people buy them. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the best at this gig, and I blame it mostly on the fact that I’m too ethical. I don’t like lying to people, nor do I like manipulating people or bending the truth. I talk to customers, tell them about this place in full honesty, and let them know my experience with living here. 

That isn’t intended to have negative connotations, by the way. I’ve lived here for two years, and it’s pretty good. It’s really good, if I’m being honest, but in the spirit of honesty, this place isn’t perfect. Nowhere is. In today’s economy, getting an apartment as nice as one of these for as cheap as they are is incredible, but they have flaws, and anyone thinking about moving here should know about those flaws. If a corporate manager saw me giving a tour, they would be pretty unhappy. I don’t sell to people, I tell them the truth. It’s not like I get some major financial bonus for lying and selling, and it isn’t like the corporate people are losing money. This is a nice apartment in a college town, they’re going to fully lease out regardless of how hard I sell to people. Maybe I’m a bad salesperson. Maybe I just care about my morals.

Of course, most of the time it isn’t like that. Fall is leasing season, and that’s because this is a college apartment complex in a college town. Leases start in the fall, and end with the summer. We don’t spend all year leasing, though. Most of the time, we get fully leased in a matter of months. We start leasing around mid October, and finish around February. That’s just slightly more than four months. So what do we do for the other eight and a half months of the year? Well, we spend about three weeks in July doing moveout and preparing for the new move-ins, usually requiring us part timers to temporarily switch to full time work. That’s half a month covered. The other eight months?

The rest of the year, in between leasing seasons, we sit in the office, and we wait.

We wait for phone calls, we wait for questions from residents, we wait for menial tasks to take care of. We still get a few people who want to lease, but since we don’t have any availability, they either immediately lose interest, or they get put on the waitlist. There isn’t any work proactively convincing people to buy, so our work starts being passive. We work when a call comes in, when someone walks in the front door. Once leasing season is over, I’m hardly ever doing any actual ‘work.’ More often than not, I spend my time on the clock finishing homework, reading textbooks, or taking advantage of quiet time at a computer by working on one of my many projects. Breaking the fourth wall just a bit, I’m writing this little rant while sitting at my desk in the leasing office. 

This free time to work on things is almost exclusively why I stay here at all. I don’t get paid much, just a couple bucks over minimum wage, less than my previous job paid, and during leasing season I get a couple commission payments. Despite the mediocre pay and boring work, though, I value the free time to focus on projects. Of course, this isn’t even mentioning the convenience of working where I live. I’m not passionate at all about my job, but when spring rolls around and the community is fully leased up, I like being able to come in and get paid to work on whatever I feel like. It’s freeing, you know? Being paid to do whatever I like, and in exchange I just have to answer a phone every half hour.

Towards the end of spring, we stop getting prospect calls at all, and are typically speaking only to current and future residents. Residents hardly ever cause me any distress. They’re almost exclusively college students, almost all of whom work service jobs similar to mine, if not even more arduous, and they’re leasing at a pretty inexpensive apartment, so they rarely have the rude entitlement that wealthy and upper-middle class people tend to have. Because of that, when they are upset, they don’t typically take it out on me. They understand that I’m a part-timer, living in the same community as them, facing the same problems they do. They treat me like a human, just as I try to do for them. 

It should go without saying though that there are some outliers, and those outliers are called parents, or ‘guarantors’ in my work lingo. You see, a lot of parents have difficulty letting go of the mindset that their child is a baby in need of coddling and protection. They also tend to be out of touch, being much meaner than their children would be since they don’t understand that the person on the phone is not causing their suffering. Most younger people I speak to have an unspoken understanding of the fact that I’m just a person on the phone. Even if they don’t know that I’m a resident, they understand that I’m not the villain of their story, I’m just the messenger. Parents simply don’t get that. 

Just a few hours prior to me writing this, I received a phone call, one that inspired me to write this in the first place. I was sitting at my desk, working on some assignments for my summer course, when the phone rang, and I briskly answered it. It was a guarantor, the parent of a resident set to move out this month. He had reached out to do a ledger inquiry. You see, it’s the first of the month, and rent prices had been posted. This particular parent, let’s call him John Doe, saw that we were charging rent for the entire month, but leases end on 22nd. That means for nine days of the month, his daughter, Jane Doe, would be paying rent on a space she could not live in. At the start of the phone call, he sounded mostly confused. It was clear that he believed a simple mistake had been made, that Jane had accidentally been charged the full month when she was supposed to be charged less.

His confusion, I’m sure you would agree, is completely justified. Were I in his place, I would also call and ask about it. Unfortunately, our apartment complex, as well as most college apartments for the record, does not prorate rent payments. That means we charge for the entire lease term, not month for month, and therefore each month costs the same, no matter if the month is cut short in the lease.  This is when John’s confusion started shifting into anger. 

“That makes no sense!” He declared. “Why am I paying rent for the time my daughter doesn’t even live there?”

Right then was when I could tell that this call was going to be a problem. There’s a very particular tone of upset you can hear in people when they’re going to start a ruckus. It’s very distinct from an upset of despair, or just general annoyance. His tone radiated a vibe of “I’m angry and I’m going to make that your problem.” Reading this tone, I codeshifted and entered de-escalation mode. By the way, when you’re already not charismatic enough to be a salesperson, doing de-escalation is not a very easy thing to do. 

“Well, sir, unfortunately we don't prorate rent, as is stated in the lease agreement. Even if your daughter cannot stay past the 22nd, she is required to pay for the full month’s rent.”

“That’s such a scam! No apartments do that!” This is frankly just not true. Not prorating rent is a very common practice, especially among college apartments. Obviously, though, telling him that would just make the situation worse. You can’t fact check a customer on the phone. It just makes them angrier. He continued, “I’ve literally been a landlord, so I know what I’m talking about! It just isn’t right! If I’m paying for a month of rent, then why can’t my daughter stay there for the whole month?” 

Here we go, I thought to myself, a question I can actually answer without having to pivot. Maybe John will calm down a bit if he has a specific explanation for why Jane can’t be there. “Well, sir, we require that the apartment be vacated for a period of time so that we can assess the space, take care of any cleaning or damages, and redo paint and maintenance for the future tenant.”

Of course, I was wrong about John Doe’s temper. It did not give John any closure to hear an explanation, it only riled him up more. “So I’m paying rent so that you can clean the apartment? That’s bullshit. If I’m gonna pay rent, then Jane should be allowed to stay there!”

In trying to ease tensions, I had only made things worse, so it was back to standard de-escalation talk, lots of words with no substance. “I understand why you’re upset, sir. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do regarding this matter.”

“Well why the hell not? This is complete bullshit and I shouldn’t have to put up with it.”

“In the lease agreement you and Jane signed, it states that the lease ends on July 22nd, and that we don't prorate rent. Because of this, even if your lease ends before the month does, we charge for the entire month.”

“This is such a scam. Your company is screwing us over with this. We’re losing a quarter of a month, so we shouldn’t have to pay for that quarter of the month! I’m sure your company snuck some stupid little line somewhere in the lease about that rent stuff, but you can bet I’m gonna read over it all, and make sure it’s all there!”

“You can definitely do that, sir. If you notice any discrepancies in the lease, please reach out, and we’ll get them taken care of.”

“Oh I will. I’m so glad my daughter isn’t renewing with your company, because this is bullshit and it’s a scam!”

He hung up before I could get another word in. I’m just glad the call was as brief as it was. Four minutes isn't very long at all. I’ve had calls in the past with much more venom and ire that lasted upwards of twenty minutes. This one wasn’t too bad. For some reason, though, it stuck with me. When he hung up, I just kinda sat in my chair for a minute, holding that phone to my ear. I felt kinda heavy, a little bit upset. Why? I’m not really sure. I guess this morning, I was feeling particularly vulnerable. I like to think I have a relatively thick skin, especially when it comes to the opinions of strangers. As I’ve said, I’ve had much angrier phone calls that last much longer, but none of them upset me the way this one did. 

The funny thing is, I completely agree with him. Outside of the work persona, I think he’s completely right. He shouldn’t have to pay for the full month if he isn’t going to be there for the full month. It’s a very consistent theme among angry phone calls, that a lot of them are in the right, at least a little bit. It isn’t fair, and they have a right to complain about it. Many of these callers are just idiots being mean because they won’t accept that they’re wrong, but there are just as many who are completely correct, even if they’re being an asshole about it. 

The problem is that I’m not outside the work persona. I’m in the office, and I have to be the person my job pays me to be. I can’t be myself, agreeing with people on if I think a decision is or is not right. If I told a customer “I think you’re absolutely 100% in the right, but the corpos don’t care,” then I would get fired on the spot. I probably wouldn’t even be able to list this place as a reference because of it. I have to stick to the work persona, and balancing my moral code with that is just a challenge I have to work around.

There’s something in the phone call that stuck out to me, something I noticed as soon as the words left John Doe’s mouth. The way he kept saying “your company.” My company? This isn’t my company. I don’t own this company, I don’t manage this company, I don’t maintain this company, I don’t even work full time here. I answer phone calls, and that’s it. This isn’t my company, it’s a company that I happen to work at. I’m not being mean, or rude, or dismissive, I’m just saying what I’m required to say. I’m telling the truth. This isn’t even me falling short of my morals. I’m not lying to you to sell a lease, I’m telling you exactly what that lease says. Even when I follow the rules, even when I tell you exactly what I’m supposed to say, and don’t fall short of the truth I want to stay in, you still get angry at me. You blame me, and call it my company. 

I think of all the things I dislike about this job, being dehumanized is the worst one. Most people my age understand what it’s like, so they treat me like a living being, but the parents? To them, I’m just a disembodied voice on a phone, an icon of the system, another brick in the wall or cog in the machine, part of the enemy. 

Is that true, though? Am I part of the enemy? I don’t want to think I am. 

This job makes me feel so much less like a person. I take so many phone calls, repeat the exact same script over and over again, answering questions that could be answered so much faster with a Google search or by checking the lease. I’m ruled by corporate overlords, people who sold their souls for cash and prestige decades ago, people who discourage me from behaving like a human, because to them, I’m not a human, I’m a tool. 

This job is already bad enough with all the people above me treating me like a pawn, barely worth consideration. It’s only made worse when the people I’m paid to speak to view me the exact same way as my superiors do: below them. A lesser creature. I’m a mediator of their pain, an accomplice in the crimes of the corporate overlords. I’m sickening, and deserve to be belittled, mocked, hated.

I wish that more of the people I spoke to understood what I am. So many people talk to me as if I cause their suffering, as if I’m the mastermind behind their pain, but that’s just not true. I don’t write the leases that they sign, I don’t create the policies that end up screwing them over, I don’t make the loopholes that allow the company to screw them over.

I am not the company.

I’m an employee. One of many. I’m working a job I don’t like because I need to eat at night, and at the end of the month I also have to pay rent. I’m a medium between the overlords and the people they hurt. I’m not a human. To the corpos, I’m just a sign that can talk. I relay facts, information, and instructions to the people they hurt. Then, when the people they hurt start to bleed, they search for a perpetrator, but they can’t get to who actually hurt them. The system is too big, too complicated, filled with so many obfuscations of duty and responsibility that past a certain point it’s impossible to know who even holds the blame for a certain policy decision. In lieu of a perpetrator to act out their anger on, they latch onto me, distort their vision to see me, not as an unfortunate messenger, but as the oppressor. 

We are all victims of this system. I don’t like to be a part of this system, but I have to work somewhere, don’t I? No matter where I work, someone is going to be hurt. There’s a victim in every system, even if some can obscure their victims better than others. 

Is this kind of ridicule worth the free time? Is being the object of senseless hatred worth the paid study session? Is being an indirect agent in the hurt of others worth having some time to write my projects?

Sometimes, I’m not so sure.