How is this legal

We moved here from out of town. Every property manager has a fee to apply for an apartment. You have to pay the fee to find out if the property is still available. So, you pay your $40 and within ten minutes your told, sorry, that property was already rented out, here are the 100 other properties we have that you should apply for. You then immediately apply for another one, spend the 40 dollars again and find out right away that one was taken.

Now the property manager has earned $80 on properties it very well knew they could not rent.