Renting can be one of the biggest headaches of modern life - working on my PhD at NYU (and studying SF tech culture!) I had so many experiences with lease fraud and bad landlords that I decided to build Augrented. We've served thousands of in-depth building reports in the past year, and now present the world's first legal assistance and concierge service made just for renters! By using a suite of state-of-the-science text classification and natural language processing methods (already well established in commercial RE lease analytics), conversational assistant tech, and innovative approaches to providing legal services, we want to make renting safe and secure for everyone. Renter's insurance covers you against almost every risk apart from having a bad landlord: Augrented Tenancy Protection plans fill in that gap. We're addressing widespread problems: Harvard Law School research has shown that at least 70% of residential leases contain misleading or unenforceable clauses. Even sky-high NYC and SF rents are no guarantee a landlord or manager will be responsive. If you're too busy to keep pestering your property manager to address maintenance requests, choose our Concierge plan and our team will take care of dealing with your landlord - and we'll even help with emergency heat and cooling! If you need it, you can also get free legal assistance with landlord-tenant issues like unlawful eviction, security deposit fraud and rent control disputes. Had (or have) a landlord or apartment issue and wonder how we'd help? Let me know in the comments!

In my state landlords are required to mitigate any rent loss caused by lease breaks. I informed my landlord of my 60 day intention to leave my lease a month or two before lease end and asked them to begin searching for a new tenant. They are acting like no such obligation exists and that I must agree to break the lease by paying a two months penalty to leave early. Also, landlords cannot charge returned check fees that are unreasonable, which legally means proportional to the actual costs incurred. They charged me a $75 returned check fee when my payment was accidentaly drawn on a closed account and claimed $75 was reasonable but wouldn't detail their actual costs.