I have often wondered why so many apartment ads on Craigslist contain no photos. Of course, some landlords may just be lazy, but I think the main reason for this is that there are a lot of very elderly landlords who have no technological skills at all. I know people who don’t know how to use a digital camera or how to upload photos from a camera to a computer.

On the other hand, some apartment ads contain no photos for good reason. There are landlords who, as a matter of policy, do not clean vacant apartments before offering them for rent. This is unfortunately quite common here in Berkeley. If a landlord is renting an apartment that was trashed by the last tenant, and he has no intention of cleaning the place up, he is probably not going to include photos in his listing. Below is a photo that one landlord included in a listing for a ‘Charming 2 Bedroom Apartment Near Campus.’ It seems to me that this guy could have at least closed the oven door and removed the mattress from the kitchen floor before photographing this depressing room! The photos of the other rooms weren’t any better. The photo of the living room showed rat traps scattered around the room. One of the traps appeared to have a dead rat in it, but the room was so dark that it was hard to be sure. I think this landlord’s definition of the word ‘charming’ must be quite different from mine.

Even Worse.

What could be worse than the listing above? How about this one. Below is a photo taken from an ad for a house for sale in Raleigh, North Carolina. An old man lived alone in this house. He died on the living room floor. If you look at the photo carefully, you can clearly see the silhouette of his corpse on the floor. The house sold for substantially below the list price.