Reddit? LinkedIn? NYC’s brutal rental market inspires social media crowdsourcing.

New York City’s hypercompetitive real estate market is still resulting in long lines at open houses for apartments, rents that far outpace median incomes and out-of-luck tenants struggling to find appropriate places to live.

But the increasingly cutthroat housing landscape is also spawning new crowdsourced listing services that can help renters get a jump on available units and maybe even avoid thousands of dollars in upfront broker fees.

The informal services are offering an opportunity for tenants to share experiences, connect with landlords before apartments officially hit the market, and possibly circumvent real estate agents as apartment hunters face rising rents and a shortage of available units. Median monthly rents have hovered around $3,800 for the past two months, about $50 more than the same time last year, according to the listings site StreetEasy .

“The market is a nightmare,” said tech entrepreneur Giulio Colleluori, who set up one of the new services three months ago with a simple Reddit post. “You kind of lose all hope.”

In April, Colleluori created a spreadsheet where people could post information about apartments they were planning to move out of and see other soon-to-be-available units. He posted a link to the “lease swap” project on Reddit in late April and said he received around 100 entries in one day.

Colleluori — who previously built an Airbnb-style platform geared toward "van life" nomads seeking parking spots, showers and WiFi — said he was inspired to create the spreadsheet after standing on a long line to see an apartment in Manhattan.

“You get into these open houses and by time you do, the apartment has been rented,” he said.

Colleluori said that while he and his girlfriend were waiting, they spoke with another prospective tenant who was interested in taking over his girlfriend’s studio apartment. Other people on line overheard the conversation and were interested in the idea of swapping apartments, he said. None of them got the unit they came to see.

Colleluori said he set up the spreadsheet later that night and the people he met at the open house were the first to add their names and apartments to the list.

A few weeks later, he moved the project to a new platform he built, called LeaseSwap NYC . It allows tenants to post apartments they plan to leave in exchange for access to a map of listings posted by other tenants.

He said the project doesn’t automatically mean landlords will accept an interested tenant or that users will be able to avoid paying a broker fee, but it does give them a head start on inquiring about a unit before it hits the market. It can also limit the amount of time an apartment stays empty between tenants, allowing landlords to continue earning income.

“Great apartments are passed down anyway, and we’re just giving a platform to streamline it," he said.

Colleluori said the app has so far featured more than 300 listings and has around 1,300 users, some of whom pay about $25 for a monthly subscription that provides instant alerts whenever a new apartment is listed on StreetEasy, Craigslist and other rental platforms.

But users can also freely access a map of apartments by sharing their own unit or by recruiting two others to join the app. Colleluori said he manually reviews the listings, removes seemingly fake apartments and deactivates users who appear to be brokers.

A current map of listings shows dozens of apartments throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn and western Queens, with a handful in the Bronx and one as far north as Mount Vernon.

“It’s a community-driven middle finger to the status quo of NYC apartment hunting,” he wrote in a Medium post about the app.

Tenants’ rights attorney Leah Goodridge, a member of the city's planning commission who often writes about housing policy and trends, said the crowdsourced apartment listings highlight the vicious competition and various fees that can prevent people from finding a home in the five boroughs.

“The fact that it’s necessary and popular is a symptom of larger problems in the New York City housing crisis,” she said.

Goodridge said tools that help tenants avoid broker fees can make it easier for people to move without forking over lump sums of several thousands of dollars. The City Council is now considering legislation that would assign broker fees to whoever hires the broker, which is usually the landlord. The bill faces strong opposition from the real estate industry and groups representing owners and brokers.

Ridgewood native Eric Li also decided to start a peer-to-peer project to help cut out middlemen in the rental process. But he came with a different perspective from Colleluori's.

Li, an associate account executive at Amazon Web Services, owned a condo in Seattle and wanted to rent it out before moving back to Queens. He said that although he listed the unit on Zillow and found a tenant, the process motivated him to study how tenants find apartments and landlords find tenants.

Li said that Facebook, Craigslist and Reddit were useful ways for landlords and tenants to connect, but most social media platforms make it easy for users to post anonymously or deceptively.

“There were a lot more scammers, a lot more spammers, a lot more bots,” he said. “But the concept itself worked.”

Li said he realized that LinkedIn could offer more transparency because users generally post with their real identities and verifiable information. When he returned to Queens, Li decided to turn a website for job hunters, self-promoters and networkers into an apartment search project.

His New York City housing LinkedIn group now has nearly 6,000 users, including tenants, landlords and people interested in moving to the five boroughs for work. He advises members that broker fees and other third-party expenses are “absolutely” banned. The group description also notes that members must obey fair housing laws, and Li said he removes short-term rental listings that violate city law.

“I just created a marketplace where it ensures authenticity,” he said. “There's no fraud, no bots, none of that. So people then communicate one-on-one.”