|13 min read
By Irina Teveleva
If you have made an enquiry about a rental property in America in the past few years, you might have encountered someone named Annie. It wouldn’t have mattered whether it was midnight in Missouri, Christmas in Montana, or 5am in Malibu: within minutes, you would have received a text back from a phone number with a local area code. Annie introduced herself as an off-site scheduling assistant, and she was always available and quick to reply. Her messages were carefully composed with commas and full stops, and she switched easily into Spanish. But strangely, she was insistently call-averse (“Sorry, I can’t talk on the phone,”) and couldn’t answer whether an apartment building had an elevator.