Recently I moved into my new apartment, and it was time to rent my old place. The apartment is on the edge of the Vake neighborhood, so it's almost in the center. It has around 64 squire meters of space and has a good enough renovation. The building is not great, but not the worst either. Since the apartment is on the twelfth floor and windows do not face the street, it has a better-than-average view.
As soon as we moved all the things to the new place, we paid a cleaner 60$ to make up the apartment, took pictures, and posted it on the most popular real estate portal MyHome.ge with the price of 1200$. The idea was to start high and lower the price by 50$ a day or two. Right away, we started getting calls from agents even though we stated in the post that we won't rent through an agency. Only after a few days, with the price of 1100, did one couple come to check the apartment, they seemed to like it, but we didn't hear from them again.
While we didn't want to deal with agencies, some said they would bring people but would charge tenants instead of us. While it felt strange to us why people would rent through an agency while you can go to the website and rent yourself, we agreed to show the apartment to one agent who brought two couples. One of them liked the apartment, so the agent went to print a generic rental agreement, and we both signed the one-year lease with 1050$ monthly payment. The agent made 550$ from this deal.
I'm not thinking of this money as a pure profit. There are taxes, fixing apartment things that would break, and renovations to make after tenants leave. Also, rent is superficially high in Tbilisi right now. Once the war is over, and there is less demand, prices can get twice lower.