It's a landlord's market because there are not enough properties, if there was a larger supply the tenants would be able to make choices and defacto reject bad options.
How do you change that, short of building more?
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In Europe we've used regulations. There's standardised ways to measure area of an apartment/house, and it has to be included in any ads and contract of sale/rent. If the actual area doesn't match what's in the ads/contract the landlord/seller will be in trouble. I saw a news article once where the landlord,iirc, had to return all rent money to the tenant. The tenant had lived there for a while(memory is fuzzy, I think it was years, but don't quote me on that) and in the end only paid for electricity.
I hear you guys like suing eachother in the states, seems like this kind of regulation would suit you just fine!
The parent was talking about it being a "landlords market" and wanting that to be changed. I asked how that might be possible.
Improving advertisements to make them accurate, detailed, and directly-comparable is obviously a good thing. But does not change the market in favour of the tenants; the status-quo exists because of a lack of properties. That means no matter how bad the advert(s) tenants have to choose one available. If there were a surplus of properties then it would be a tenant's market.
(I'm in Europe!)
Well, no, but it prevents fraud, which seems to be the bigger problem. A honest dominant force is better than a fraudulent dominant force.
Require advertisements for property to include the floor (and ground) area.
…and define rules for the measurement taken, like no stairs, count areas below roof sloping or outside on balconies etc. with a lower factor, exclude shared areas and cellars/attics, and so on.
Not measuring correctly, not publishing the measurements, or publishing incorrect measurements outside an error margin gets counted as deception. Offer a simple reporting contact point to citizens to report landlords or offers that violate this regulation without a lawsuit.
Advertising is already a pretty strict domain by necessity. We used to allow just about every lie under the sun in advertising, and it was universally bad. We systematically broke that down one by one over many decades, and we're still doing it! I mean, these days you can't even sell tobacco without saying "hey we're trying to kill you btw".
This is a very well-trodden path, I think.
While that would be useful it would not change it from a landlords-market - which is what the comment I replied to was about.