A smart intercom company has offered New York City landlords a solution to help evict bad-acting tenants, allowing them to raise rents where laws and regulations would typically stand in the way.
Teman GateGuard, a company and product started by CEO Ari Teman, sent out a promotional email to landlords opening with, “You CAN raise rents in NYC!” The product is a smart intercom lock to be installed on apartment doors. A landlord would be able to see still images of people in, out, and in front of the apartment. Teman says the goal is to catch tenants acting in bad faith, such as operating illicit Airbnb’s, subletting, or having unreported roommates.
“We can’t help you get any random person out. They have to be breaking the law,” Teman said. “They have to be running a drug den or a brothel or an Airbnb, or they have to be holding onto a unit and not living in there at all and storing it for three years because their kid is going to graduate college. So those are all against the law. New York has these laws to make sure apartments are used for people living there.”
Concerns surrounding tenant harassment and surveillance rise anytime new technology-monitoring activities are introduced, and this is no different.
“This is exactly the sort of predatory behavior that we feared residential surveillance would enable,” Albert Fox Cahn, director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told CNET. “Facial recognition and emerging forms of AI give landlords alarming power to harass rent-stabilized tenants.”
Despite these concerns, Teman said that only still photos of the outside of apartments are taken, and there is no facial recognition. He also insisted that landlords only check the photos when complaints are levied, either about parties, bedbugs, transients, stolen packages — all risks that come from the operation of illegal hotels. The images are stored via a cloud service, and Teman said that outside a court order, photos would not be made available to local authorities. The product, Teman said, is specifically to help landlords increase the value of their properties by helping root out illegal activities and make apartments more secure.
It isn’t Teman’s first venture into protecting landlords. He said he had a bad experience with Airbnb when a group he rented to had an orgy in his apartment, costing him thousands of dollars in damage. Teman created SubletSpy. Landlords could contract Teman’s company to comb through Airbnb or a similar service’s listings to see if a property was illegally being used.
Teman maintained that his products are in no way meant to hurt lawful residents and rent-controlled tenants.
“No, there’s no way. In fact, it helps them,” Teman said. “If you’re coming in and out of your building every day, or frequently enough that you live there, now you have proof, and the landlord can’t run to court and try to tell the judge that you’re not really living in the apartment. If you’re not running illegal hotels, there’s not going to be any traffic. So, this protects the tenant. Sketchy landlords, the guys who are real criminals, they won’t talk to us. We’re on the tenant’s side.”
Teman pointed to punishments for illegal Airbnbs being the burden of property owners, as New York City can hold them responsible if a tenant runs an unlawful hotel out of an apartment, leading to possibly thousands of dollars in fines.
“This notion of harassing people out of the building, it doesn’t even exist. There’s no financial incentive in New York City to go after somebody that’s not breaking a law. You’ll get massive fines, we certainly won’t help you do it, and you won’t be able to raise the rent when the person leaves. The only incentive now is to get rid of the Airbnb hosts because it would cost you a $50,000 fine. If you do everything legally, the city will let you combine units, and you have to renovate the whole building — it’s a $250,000 project — it’s not free. It’s not like you get the guy out and you can raise rents the next day.”
Teman’s email provided examples to landlords combining one-bedroom and studio units into two-bedroom units to capitalize more but acknowledged the massive costs for such projects.
