“None of the companies admitted fault or liability. They did, however, agree to stop providing Realpage with their nonpublic data for use as an input in Realpage’s revenue management system’s price recommendations, and to stop using Realpage’s RMS in ways that use competitors’ non-public data to inform pricing recommendations”.
Okay but Realpage has a decade of real pricing data that it can use to continue informing these rental companies and outside of them having extremely hard boundaries in their service this is just going to happen again.
This doesn’t do a whole lot to address the actual issue, and these companies aren’t going to stop colluding over a wrist slap like this.
Basically when somebody makes a pricing error on a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange there's a mob of automated arbitrage bots that try to trade against it. Who wins and actually gets to make the trade is mainly determined by how high of a transaction fee your bot is willing to pay.
You can win instantly by offering to trade with a transaction fee so high it almost wipes out all but a cent or two of the entire arbitrage profits, because nobody else will pay a higher fee.
Instead what happens is bots offer the lowest possible fee, then immediately increase their fee as soon as they see a competing bot try to take the trade with a higher fee. This results in the bot offering the highest fee changing every several milliseconds as the fee quickly grows.
The way Ethereum mining works, this results in the winning bot being randomly selected from among the set of bots "bidding" up the transaction fee: blocks are mined at random intervals of iirc about 20 seconds, and whoever had the highest bid at the time the next block is mined wins. <20 seconds of bidding is short enough that even with the bidding, the transaction fee doesn't get bid up particularly high, and the winner makes out with a highly profitable arbitrage trade.
By giving up a guaranteed win and instead rolling the dice against other bots, transaction fees stay low and everyone has a higher expected profit. It's coordination that happens without any communication between the participants and quite possibly the participants didn't realize they were in effect cooperating when they added the high speed bidding behavior to their bots.
> You can win instantly by offering to trade with a transaction fee so high it almost wipes out all but a cent or two of the entire arbitrage profits, because nobody else will pay a higher fee
This is like 1980s sawtooth algos in real finance.
A lot of crypto is former HF folks taking old strategies to a dumber field.
I have really enjoyed watching crypto act like they are white knights against the evil traditional financial system and then go on to reinvent it piece by piece.
That isnt cooperation. That is basic market principals in action. Bid and counter bids that whittle down the profit margin based on willingness to risk a win/loss? These are auction principals as old as time. This is reaction rather than cooperation.
Is there an actual issue? I've seen compelling arguments that places that banned the practice of algorithmic rent setting did not see any appreciable drop in rents. I'm almost convinced the problem is entirely supply side.
There's more housing than people. What's artificially limited is salaries. Higher salaries would mean massive benefits for workers and businesses. And catastrophe for non workers and real estate.
There is no price fixing. They just enabled landlords to find out how high the market price actually was when they didn't know it before due to it being a very opaque market.
The market price is the price for which people are renting places based on market forces.
If the only market forces are landlords keeping half of their units empty so they can keep $1400 units priced at $2400 because that’s what the software (and indeed service) are pushing them to do, that’s price fixing.
There’s extra steps, it’s a new form, but the price is fixed, and the point of allowing housing to be built isn’t being fulfilled.
If it's causally linked to higher prices, I agree. My question is whether we certainly know it's causally linked. In my mind right now it's similarly plausible that these things are just snake oil sold to landlords. There are a ton of conspiracy theories that would be a real problem, if true.
Landlords have an inherent trade off between holding out for a tenant who would pay a higher rent and not having the unit vacant in the meantime. Holding out for longer than that helps the other landlords at your expense. Meanwhile there are a large number of landlords, there is no way for the ones using a given system to force the others to do the same, and a significant percentage of them don't.
So if the system tells the landlords using it to do the thing that would increase rents if every landlord was using it, the "defectors" who don't use the system win out over anyone using it, which means using the system rather than defecting would cause you to lose money and everyone would have the incentive to defect.
Whereas if all the system is doing is suggesting the optimal point in the trade off between holding out for a higher paying tenant and renting the unit sooner, without assuming the other landlords are being required to use the same system, that's the same thing an individual landlord would do if they're not colluding.
The actual way landlords collude is through zoning boards, because then they have an enforcement mechanism, i.e. if someone is trying to defect by adding new units to alleviate the limited supply then the other landlords can sic the government on them, having passed the various laws against constructing those units there.
Using data feed to guide pricing and set initial figures: legal.
Agreeing, either implicitly or explicitly, to let the pricing data feed set the price floor: collusion.
Leaving units unsold and refusing to lower the price despite insufficient demand: usually a bad business decision, possibly indicator of a market failure.
Leaving units unsold to maintain agreed-upon price floor despite insufficient demand: collusion, market manipulation. Congratulations, you are a cartel.
They got a wrist slap because the case was flimsy and probably wouldn't stand up in court. This looks nothing like price fixing and everything like price discovery in an undersupplied market, and the people bringing the case are the same government responsible for the actual problem.
How it works in Victoria, Australia is for renewing an existing lease is you must provide examples of comparable rentals in the area at or above the price you are proposing. And the tenant can dispute with their own comparable if they believe the price is wrong. New listings can be listed at any price.
There is enough turnover with new listings to find the market rate while preventing existing tenants from being screwed over by unreasonable prices.
Australia also almost entirely works off rentals owned by individuals who own 1-3 properties rather than corporate owners so no one landlord has any sway over the market.
Most landlords arent big corporate in the USA either especially in areas where the housing crisis is the worst.
I think this narrative is just meant to distract people from questioning the necessity of the landlord class, they want people angry at a faceless corporate boogieman instead of local landlords (for obvious reasons)
That's basically a listing search page that allows you to sort by price.
What else do you expect "collective bargaining" to do in a market where every tenant has a different landlord? Your landlord isn't going to care if the tenants of 10,000 other landlords threaten to move out. They only care if you threaten to move out, and then to credibly do that what you need is to show them the unit you could move into which is asking for less.
The real problem is that you need the unit you can threaten to move into to first exist, rather than its construction being inhibited by zoning etc.
There is such a thing as a Tenant Union, and in fact they are currently spreading across the country as renters turn to collective bargaining. It works!
We have something similar in Spain, except instead of "comparable rentals in the area" there is a index (called IRAV (Índice de Referencia de los Alquileres)) maintained by the government each year, which limits how much rents can be increased. My landlord just reference that each year, it's easy for me to check if it's right, then that's it. For the areas where supply is limited ("áreas tensionadas"), as some areas like Barcelona is geographically limited to expansion, there is a total limit as well, independent of the IRAV.
Of course, if there are improvements in the rental, you can go beyond the index as the property been "improved", but it's really handy to know each year that it's limited and the exact amount. For 2026 it's locked to 2.14% for example, for everyone.
By what mechanism do the producers keep prices high if the "lots of competition" is constantly undercutting them and adding new supply to replace anything the colluding subset tries to withhold from the market?
Cost cutting while shopping for expendable commodities does not result in a long term drop in quality of life in the same way that cost cutting while selecting your residence could.
Apartment landlords don't undercut each other. They raise rents in lockstep and then offer "specials" like a month off (amortized) that lower initial out-of-pocket costs without affecting the base rent, which gets raised on subsequent lease renewals to make up the difference. The only option to avoid this is moving every year (instability being clearly great for community /s) since corporate landlords will not negotiate rates.
The prices should be delayed two months. The rate at which pricing information propagates dictates how much of the rental pricing mass (number of owners * average units owned) gets thrown around how quickly. I don't have a number, but something like 2 months. Treat this data as if it was a vile of Devil's venom [1]. If they setup back channel information sharing networks, or collusion networks of any kind. <bad thing happens, not just a fee>
Second, the historical database should be deleted. And if they can't survive that, so be it. Keeping the spoils of crime should be the crime. Justice still isn't finished.
Should rentals be seen as economic opportunities for hyper efficiencies? IE should the market be structured to extract the maximum profit from renters?
Not clear to me that is the right approach, or if owning rentals should be more of a fixed income approach (or even speculative - profits only come from the sale of the property).
The general premise of the rental market is that if rents are high, the profits from building new rental units will justify the construction costs and then new units will be added until the rents go down, i.e. until it stops being profitable to add more.
This actually works unless you inhibit the construction of new units. Naturally that's what we've been doing, which is why it isn't working. But the solution is to stop inhibiting the construction of new units.
Because the alternatives don't actually work. Unless you can build enough units to meet demand, there aren't enough units. Which means you either have high prices which suppress demand because people who can't afford them are forced out, or shortages because you're imposing some inadvisable price controls and then instead of being unable to get a unit because you can't afford the rent, you can't get a unit because they're all occupied and no one is adding more.
Al la dc rent registry, which I always thought was ironic because doesn’t this create a database where landlords can consider prices based on others… but I guess it would be public in this case.
Well the point of market based interventions and government regulations like this is primarily to reduce information asymmetry. You still ultimately need to increase supply or reduce demand to move price.
Depends on the rate of information update and how long the records are retained for. High frequency updates create a higher fidelity information channel.
I don’t see why rental agreements can’t be registered with the county like house sales are. It would also eliminate the need for squatter laws, as it would be trivial for police to pull up the county website and see who belongs in the home.
Americans are too privacy focused to accept this, but I could easily see a cottage industry of "registered agents" popping up around it who sign leases on behalf of individuals and shield them from public scrutiny.
Alternatively we could keep the names private. A cryptographic solution would easily serve the need of authorities verifying the right person is in a place without identification, but good luck figuring out how to ensure the tenant has their keys somehow since in the US there are zero pieces of identification you can ensure every citizen has.
American's seem to only care about privacy from the government, but wanting privacy from trillion dollar corporations? They keep the stock market high and provide value to their major investors and everyone's retirement accounts so obviously its fully within their rights to spy on us 24/7. /s
The fact that the number of houses owned by large corporations is so low as to be insignificant shows that it’s basically 0% of the cause. (I’m assuming you’re not against a landlord who owns a small number of properties forming an LLC, but mean companies that rent lots of properties.)
It is a supply issue caused by local building codes and zoning. Full stop. Everything else is just pretending to do something about the problem, and corporations are just scapegoats.
I filed my claim, and based on their calculator this might be the most serious check from a class action (assuming I get the full amount). For me its ~1.5k between 3 named landlords.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Land ownership is the biggest business and the source of the biggest conspiracies.
I've been saying this for a while, but there is a cottage industry like RealPage in pretty much every industry. These companies need to be slammed out of existence for anti-competitive pricing and collusion. So much corruption. I'm so sick of fraud and corruption.
I had a plumber over to quote a HVAC replacement, while he was working up the quote I saw his iPad where his was inputting the equipment for costs etc, then it flipped over to an area that showed my home estimated value, my estimated household income and a ton of other economic measures that gave them sweet spots for their quote.
While I obviously know people do this, to see it so blatantly laid out (it wasn’t meant for my eyes) was very gross.
By the way, the home value and income estimates were higher than reality, and his quote was also fairly high - though not the highest
AUTOMATIC PRICE UPDATES
New pricing information automatically pushes to marketing website and ILS listings in real time.
During a six month study with an Entrata client using Entrata Pricing, market rents grew 15% more than a comparable set of properties within the same company.
Their marketing documents admitted to the exact same behavior.
No one cared about those of us hurt by this company to even bother filing a lawsuit against them.
I wonder what empirical and theoretical substance there is to the idea that the cost of living is due to lack of competition (in zero-to-one markets), and that competition is the solution to much of this.
On that basis, the 'free market' should be called the 'free, competitive market' - without competition, it has little value. Businesses should be required to compete and to opeerate in competitive markets. Anything anti-competitive should be treated harshly.
I was curious, so I looked this up: Section 5.3 of the 2010 U.S. merger-guideline explicitly classified markets with a Herfindahl–Hirschman Index below 1,500 as “unconcentrated.”
I can't quote the formula here, but HHI is, apparently, the sum of squared percentage market shares. Six equal-sized suppliers give an HHI of approximately 1,667, while seven give approximately 1,429—on opposite sides of the 2010 threshold.
U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, Statements of Antitrust Enforcement Policy in Health Care (August 1996) is also a good read page 44.
> In assembling information to be collectively provided to
purchasers, providers need to be aware of the potential antitrust consequences of information exchanges among competitors.
> the collection is managed by a third party (e.g., a
purchaser, government agency, health care consultant,
academic institution, or trade association);
> although current fee-related information may be provided
to purchasers, any information that is shared among or
is available to the competing providers furnishing the
data must be more than three months old; and
> for any information that is available to the providers
furnishing data, there are at least five providers
reporting data upon which each disseminated statistic is
based, no individual provider's data may represent more
than 25 percent on a weighted basis of that statistic,
and any information disseminated must be sufficiently
aggregated such that it would not allow recipients to
identify the prices charged by any individual provider.
> The conditions that must be met for an information exchange
among providers to fall within the antitrust safety zone are
intended to ensure that an exchange of price or cost data is not
used by competing providers for discussion or coordination of
provider prices or costs.
>> Businesses should be required to compete and to opeerate in competitive markets.
I'm not sure I understand where you are going with this? Are you suggesting that a new product cannot enter a market without a number of simultaneous competitors?
If I want to roll out fibre to an area that doesn't have it, can I? If I want to build a fresh-produce store in a town that doesn't have one, then I need to find someone else to compete with?
Lots and lots of businesses operate as quasi-monopolies if you look hard enough. Especially in smaller and rural environments. Lots and lots of places have one gas station, one mechanic, one vet, one doctor, one diner and so on.
Your use of the word "require" seems difficult to implement. What if no-one wants to compete with me? If Apple stops making Macs, does MS have to stop making Windows?
I agree that those are challenges. Maintaining competition in markets is well-studied; I wonder what has been found - what can be done, how can the scope be limited without failing on the outcomes, etc.
RealPage's competition were doing the exact same thing and completely escaped oversight or retribution. The rental market is corrupt and crooked nationwide, and these lawsuits flubbed a chance at making a real change.
Not that it wasn't predictable. Follow the money: who owns the property and REITs that rely on squeezing renters for every cent? Certainly not lawyers, judges, and politicians. /s
I leased at two RealPage properties for a combined 151 months. Both of them were confirmed to be colluding with one another and they were both confirmed as “high software collusion” by an expert. I calculated that the max payout I could get is ~$83,000 for the estimated amount I was overcharged rent for those ~12 years.
It's both funny and sad to see the mental gymnastics of people trying to find solutions to this when the solution is real simple: it's public ownership.
Housing needs to be decommodified. It needs to stop being a retirement plan. We need to stop letting people hoard it. We need to stop subsidizing exurbs and making it illegal to build the kind of walkable communities people actually like. Case in point: Red Vienna [1].
As another commenter noted, this is in every industry. Utilities are a particularly bad one including telcos. All the best ISPs in the US are municipally owned. Chattanooga was the first really big poster child for this.
Privatization of all these things is just rent-seeking behavior.
So many of society's problems come down to housing being too expensive. Anything that makes it expensive needs to be stamped out and that includes RealPage as well as Airbnb/VRBO.
It is not just housing but all land - the grocery store ups prices without increasing profit because every landowner in the supply chain (who they rent their stores from, their warehouses, the factories that process and package foods, the farms themselves) ups rent too.
This is a predictable outcome of commerce due to the limited supply of land and is described in some detail by Adam Smith and developed by later thinkers like Riccardo and George (who took it to its logical conclusion and inspired the board game Monopoly).
During the 20th century, economics was wholesale rewritten to blur the lines between land and capital so as to bury this awkward conversation.
The general recommendation of these early economists was taxing land - moderate in the case of Smith, up to 100% per George. This amounts to public ownership of part of the profits of land ownership.
> It's both funny and sad to see the mental gymnastics of people trying to find solutions to this when the solution is real simple: it's public ownership.
No, it is not. Communism tried that and all communist countries failed spectacularly. Public ownership in practice means that everyone has rights but zero responsibilities.
Taking people's private property is not a solution to any crisis. This whole housing thing looks like "I want to have my cake and eat it too".
But then USSR wasn't really communist either, it was far more defined by dictatorship of individuals; which is diametrically opposed to communism.
If you have people living in palaces whilst others starve then you don't have communism - the first principle of which is that benefit of labour is split under egalitarian principles. Whilst rich people getting richer, and the devaluing of people typifies capitalism.
From my considerations, we need to limit wage disparity, eg by a top rate of tax at 100% (I know how that will be received here!). That limits power that can be accrued through wealth too - no more billionaires who can by elections. We also need to give ownership of the benefits of labour to the people; wage limits does that, but a more direct link is possible too and that can aid transition from Western Capitalism to a more equal distribution of wealth. Ultimately, globally we're going to face far more issues with migration as the effects of our past excesses take hold; redistribution of wealth across nations also needs to be accepted if we're going to manage that transition with less war and bloodshed.
“None of the companies admitted fault or liability. They did, however, agree to stop providing Realpage with their nonpublic data for use as an input in Realpage’s revenue management system’s price recommendations, and to stop using Realpage’s RMS in ways that use competitors’ non-public data to inform pricing recommendations”.
Okay but Realpage has a decade of real pricing data that it can use to continue informing these rental companies and outside of them having extremely hard boundaries in their service this is just going to happen again.
This doesn’t do a whole lot to address the actual issue, and these companies aren’t going to stop colluding over a wrist slap like this.
What about when market prices are public? Is knowing the market prices collusion?
It can be, if everyone also acts to keep prices high by behaving in ways that aren't typical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion
Reminds me of the extremely interesting paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234 Flash Boys 2.0
Basically when somebody makes a pricing error on a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange there's a mob of automated arbitrage bots that try to trade against it. Who wins and actually gets to make the trade is mainly determined by how high of a transaction fee your bot is willing to pay.
You can win instantly by offering to trade with a transaction fee so high it almost wipes out all but a cent or two of the entire arbitrage profits, because nobody else will pay a higher fee.
Instead what happens is bots offer the lowest possible fee, then immediately increase their fee as soon as they see a competing bot try to take the trade with a higher fee. This results in the bot offering the highest fee changing every several milliseconds as the fee quickly grows.
The way Ethereum mining works, this results in the winning bot being randomly selected from among the set of bots "bidding" up the transaction fee: blocks are mined at random intervals of iirc about 20 seconds, and whoever had the highest bid at the time the next block is mined wins. <20 seconds of bidding is short enough that even with the bidding, the transaction fee doesn't get bid up particularly high, and the winner makes out with a highly profitable arbitrage trade.
By giving up a guaranteed win and instead rolling the dice against other bots, transaction fees stay low and everyone has a higher expected profit. It's coordination that happens without any communication between the participants and quite possibly the participants didn't realize they were in effect cooperating when they added the high speed bidding behavior to their bots.
> You can win instantly by offering to trade with a transaction fee so high it almost wipes out all but a cent or two of the entire arbitrage profits, because nobody else will pay a higher fee
This is like 1980s sawtooth algos in real finance.
A lot of crypto is former HF folks taking old strategies to a dumber field.
I have really enjoyed watching crypto act like they are white knights against the evil traditional financial system and then go on to reinvent it piece by piece.
You're assuming that the contention was with the functionality and not with who controlled it.
That isnt cooperation. That is basic market principals in action. Bid and counter bids that whittle down the profit margin based on willingness to risk a win/loss? These are auction principals as old as time. This is reaction rather than cooperation.
Tacit collusion wouldn't work in this case, because most rental markets aren't oligopolies.
Is there an actual issue? I've seen compelling arguments that places that banned the practice of algorithmic rent setting did not see any appreciable drop in rents. I'm almost convinced the problem is entirely supply side.
The problem is political, landlords run every level of government and use that power to artificially limit housing supply.
There's more housing than people. What's artificially limited is salaries. Higher salaries would mean massive benefits for workers and businesses. And catastrophe for non workers and real estate.
I’m struggling to see how real estate would be catastrophically harmed by higher salaries. Could you help me see the line between those two points?
Naively, if I knew everyone’s salaries were about to double, I’d hope to be holding a fair amount of real estate going into that doubling.
Is allowing price-fixing and deniability (ans a service) across 100 mile regions a problem, while you yourself are highlighting a supply-side crisis?
Yes. That’s a problem.
There is no price fixing. They just enabled landlords to find out how high the market price actually was when they didn't know it before due to it being a very opaque market.
The market price is the price for which people are renting places based on market forces.
If the only market forces are landlords keeping half of their units empty so they can keep $1400 units priced at $2400 because that’s what the software (and indeed service) are pushing them to do, that’s price fixing.
There’s extra steps, it’s a new form, but the price is fixed, and the point of allowing housing to be built isn’t being fulfilled.
If it's causally linked to higher prices, I agree. My question is whether we certainly know it's causally linked. In my mind right now it's similarly plausible that these things are just snake oil sold to landlords. There are a ton of conspiracy theories that would be a real problem, if true.
It's snake oil.
Landlords have an inherent trade off between holding out for a tenant who would pay a higher rent and not having the unit vacant in the meantime. Holding out for longer than that helps the other landlords at your expense. Meanwhile there are a large number of landlords, there is no way for the ones using a given system to force the others to do the same, and a significant percentage of them don't.
So if the system tells the landlords using it to do the thing that would increase rents if every landlord was using it, the "defectors" who don't use the system win out over anyone using it, which means using the system rather than defecting would cause you to lose money and everyone would have the incentive to defect.
Whereas if all the system is doing is suggesting the optimal point in the trade off between holding out for a higher paying tenant and renting the unit sooner, without assuming the other landlords are being required to use the same system, that's the same thing an individual landlord would do if they're not colluding.
The actual way landlords collude is through zoning boards, because then they have an enforcement mechanism, i.e. if someone is trying to defect by adding new units to alleviate the limited supply then the other landlords can sic the government on them, having passed the various laws against constructing those units there.
> So if the system tells the landlords using it to do the thing that would increase rents if every landlord was using it
This is precisely what happened. Quoting from my comment at the time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39579488) --
Subscribing to a pricing data service: legal.
Using data feed to guide pricing and set initial figures: legal.
Agreeing, either implicitly or explicitly, to let the pricing data feed set the price floor: collusion.
Leaving units unsold and refusing to lower the price despite insufficient demand: usually a bad business decision, possibly indicator of a market failure.
Leaving units unsold to maintain agreed-upon price floor despite insufficient demand: collusion, market manipulation. Congratulations, you are a cartel.
They got a wrist slap because the case was flimsy and probably wouldn't stand up in court. This looks nothing like price fixing and everything like price discovery in an undersupplied market, and the people bringing the case are the same government responsible for the actual problem.
We need a public rental registry of rental prices that anybody can browse, analyze, etc. The information disparity is a problem.
However, that's not a systematic method for lower prices. It just prevents individual cases of price gouging.
How it works in Victoria, Australia is for renewing an existing lease is you must provide examples of comparable rentals in the area at or above the price you are proposing. And the tenant can dispute with their own comparable if they believe the price is wrong. New listings can be listed at any price.
There is enough turnover with new listings to find the market rate while preventing existing tenants from being screwed over by unreasonable prices.
Australia also almost entirely works off rentals owned by individuals who own 1-3 properties rather than corporate owners so no one landlord has any sway over the market.
Most landlords arent big corporate in the USA either especially in areas where the housing crisis is the worst.
I think this narrative is just meant to distract people from questioning the necessity of the landlord class, they want people angry at a faceless corporate boogieman instead of local landlords (for obvious reasons)
Rental prices are set at the edge, so you only need to own a fraction of the market to drive rent increases. Corporate landlords absolutely do this.
Services like RealPage provide information that allows the small landlord to act like corporate overlords, praise be American corporatism.
How about an app that collectively bargains rents algorithmically? Call it RedPage lol.
That's basically a listing search page that allows you to sort by price.
What else do you expect "collective bargaining" to do in a market where every tenant has a different landlord? Your landlord isn't going to care if the tenants of 10,000 other landlords threaten to move out. They only care if you threaten to move out, and then to credibly do that what you need is to show them the unit you could move into which is asking for less.
The real problem is that you need the unit you can threaten to move into to first exist, rather than its construction being inhibited by zoning etc.
Collective bargaining your landlord can't ignore is you and your neighbors all withholding your rent payments until your leases are renegotiated.
There is such a thing as a Tenant Union, and in fact they are currently spreading across the country as renters turn to collective bargaining. It works!
We have something similar in Spain, except instead of "comparable rentals in the area" there is a index (called IRAV (Índice de Referencia de los Alquileres)) maintained by the government each year, which limits how much rents can be increased. My landlord just reference that each year, it's easy for me to check if it's right, then that's it. For the areas where supply is limited ("áreas tensionadas"), as some areas like Barcelona is geographically limited to expansion, there is a total limit as well, independent of the IRAV.
Of course, if there are improvements in the rental, you can go beyond the index as the property been "improved", but it's really handy to know each year that it's limited and the exact amount. For 2026 it's locked to 2.14% for example, for everyone.
A growing body of economic research shows that this allows producers to keep prices high even with lots of competition.
By what mechanism do the producers keep prices high if the "lots of competition" is constantly undercutting them and adding new supply to replace anything the colluding subset tries to withhold from the market?
Cost cutting while shopping for expendable commodities does not result in a long term drop in quality of life in the same way that cost cutting while selecting your residence could.
Apartment landlords don't undercut each other. They raise rents in lockstep and then offer "specials" like a month off (amortized) that lower initial out-of-pocket costs without affecting the base rent, which gets raised on subsequent lease renewals to make up the difference. The only option to avoid this is moving every year (instability being clearly great for community /s) since corporate landlords will not negotiate rates.
If the evidence seems to disagree with your theory, maybe your theory has to change?
The prices should be delayed two months. The rate at which pricing information propagates dictates how much of the rental pricing mass (number of owners * average units owned) gets thrown around how quickly. I don't have a number, but something like 2 months. Treat this data as if it was a vile of Devil's venom [1]. If they setup back channel information sharing networks, or collusion networks of any kind. <bad thing happens, not just a fee>
Second, the historical database should be deleted. And if they can't survive that, so be it. Keeping the spoils of crime should be the crime. Justice still isn't finished.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_venom
Can you share several articles about this? I haven't found one but it's hard to search for.
Should rentals be seen as economic opportunities for hyper efficiencies? IE should the market be structured to extract the maximum profit from renters?
Not clear to me that is the right approach, or if owning rentals should be more of a fixed income approach (or even speculative - profits only come from the sale of the property).
The general premise of the rental market is that if rents are high, the profits from building new rental units will justify the construction costs and then new units will be added until the rents go down, i.e. until it stops being profitable to add more.
This actually works unless you inhibit the construction of new units. Naturally that's what we've been doing, which is why it isn't working. But the solution is to stop inhibiting the construction of new units.
Because the alternatives don't actually work. Unless you can build enough units to meet demand, there aren't enough units. Which means you either have high prices which suppress demand because people who can't afford them are forced out, or shortages because you're imposing some inadvisable price controls and then instead of being unable to get a unit because you can't afford the rent, you can't get a unit because they're all occupied and no one is adding more.
Some states have solved this to some extent with the builder's remedy to override local zoning decisions.
And cities, like Seattle, still undercut this by taking way too long to review permits.
Al la dc rent registry, which I always thought was ironic because doesn’t this create a database where landlords can consider prices based on others… but I guess it would be public in this case.
https://rentregistry.dc.gov/
Well the point of market based interventions and government regulations like this is primarily to reduce information asymmetry. You still ultimately need to increase supply or reduce demand to move price.
Depends on the rate of information update and how long the records are retained for. High frequency updates create a higher fidelity information channel.
I don’t see why rental agreements can’t be registered with the county like house sales are. It would also eliminate the need for squatter laws, as it would be trivial for police to pull up the county website and see who belongs in the home.
Berlin wants to do that to enforce rent control more effectively.
Americans are too privacy focused to accept this, but I could easily see a cottage industry of "registered agents" popping up around it who sign leases on behalf of individuals and shield them from public scrutiny.
Alternatively we could keep the names private. A cryptographic solution would easily serve the need of authorities verifying the right person is in a place without identification, but good luck figuring out how to ensure the tenant has their keys somehow since in the US there are zero pieces of identification you can ensure every citizen has.
Are we privacy focused? Look at products like Facebook Muse, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Whatsapp, or the perv glasses, or or or
See RealID for how long certain states has been kicking that bucket down the road.
American's seem to only care about privacy from the government, but wanting privacy from trillion dollar corporations? They keep the stock market high and provide value to their major investors and everyone's retirement accounts so obviously its fully within their rights to spy on us 24/7. /s
I think publishing your own rental contract is already legal?
(Unless the other party to the contract deliberately asks you in the contract to keep it quiet. But that's something you need to actively agree to.)
It’s more credible if it’s in a government database like property sales are, plus there would be a lot more pricing data.
Well, a Torrens registry systems still isn't universal yet in the US.
[dead]
What about a law that bans house ownership and rentals unless you are a physical person and not a company? What would be the cons of such a thing?
The fact that the number of houses owned by large corporations is so low as to be insignificant shows that it’s basically 0% of the cause. (I’m assuming you’re not against a landlord who owns a small number of properties forming an LLC, but mean companies that rent lots of properties.)
It is a supply issue caused by local building codes and zoning. Full stop. Everything else is just pretending to do something about the problem, and corporations are just scapegoats.
It would dramatically reduce the availability of rental properties. So, if you really hate renters, it’s a good thing I guess.
Extremely low chance that I’m going to put my entire net worth on the line to own and rent out housing in my own name.
Exactly zero chance that I’ll do it in a multi-family or apartment building.
Holding these things in corporate title is sensible risk management and compartmentalization.
_thats it_ ???
I filed my claim, and based on their calculator this might be the most serious check from a class action (assuming I get the full amount). For me its ~1.5k between 3 named landlords.
Where is this calculator?
There is no calculator per se, in the settlement they explain the formula for payouts.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Land ownership is the biggest business and the source of the biggest conspiracies.
I've been saying this for a while, but there is a cottage industry like RealPage in pretty much every industry. These companies need to be slammed out of existence for anti-competitive pricing and collusion. So much corruption. I'm so sick of fraud and corruption.
I had a plumber over to quote a HVAC replacement, while he was working up the quote I saw his iPad where his was inputting the equipment for costs etc, then it flipped over to an area that showed my home estimated value, my estimated household income and a ton of other economic measures that gave them sweet spots for their quote. While I obviously know people do this, to see it so blatantly laid out (it wasn’t meant for my eyes) was very gross.
By the way, the home value and income estimates were higher than reality, and his quote was also fairly high - though not the highest
That sort of counters the advice to get three quotes. If every bidder has that info, it may be harder to get the "best" price.
I really can't think of any others. Which is why RealPage has been so newsworthy.
If you have examples of such a company in other industries, please share.
RealPage isn't even the only one in its industry:
https://imgur.com/a/RR2vWnJ
Their marketing documents admitted to the exact same behavior.No one cared about those of us hurt by this company to even bother filing a lawsuit against them.
I mean we all have chatgpt now:
It's pretty bold to name the price fixing software Pricef(i)x
You've never used salary data at a work place?
Companies like Radford collect salary information aggregated and sell it to other companies trying to set salary levels for similar roles.
These companies buying services from Radford are indirectly colluding through Radford, just like RealPage.
Could you give us other examples?
Yep sue propertyme next
I wonder what empirical and theoretical substance there is to the idea that the cost of living is due to lack of competition (in zero-to-one markets), and that competition is the solution to much of this.
On that basis, the 'free market' should be called the 'free, competitive market' - without competition, it has little value. Businesses should be required to compete and to opeerate in competitive markets. Anything anti-competitive should be treated harshly.
Even without outright collusion, a market without at least seven viable suppliers is not really competitive. Current "monopoly" policy is corrupt.
(Seven has been experimentally determined, but I can't recall where.)
I was curious, so I looked this up: Section 5.3 of the 2010 U.S. merger-guideline explicitly classified markets with a Herfindahl–Hirschman Index below 1,500 as “unconcentrated.”
I can't quote the formula here, but HHI is, apparently, the sum of squared percentage market shares. Six equal-sized suppliers give an HHI of approximately 1,667, while seven give approximately 1,429—on opposite sides of the 2010 threshold.
Is that where you got the number?
U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, Statements of Antitrust Enforcement Policy in Health Care (August 1996) is also a good read page 44.
> In assembling information to be collectively provided to purchasers, providers need to be aware of the potential antitrust consequences of information exchanges among competitors.
> the collection is managed by a third party (e.g., a purchaser, government agency, health care consultant, academic institution, or trade association);
> although current fee-related information may be provided to purchasers, any information that is shared among or is available to the competing providers furnishing the data must be more than three months old; and
> for any information that is available to the providers furnishing data, there are at least five providers reporting data upon which each disseminated statistic is based, no individual provider's data may represent more than 25 percent on a weighted basis of that statistic, and any information disseminated must be sufficiently aggregated such that it would not allow recipients to identify the prices charged by any individual provider.
> The conditions that must be met for an information exchange among providers to fall within the antitrust safety zone are intended to ensure that an exchange of price or cost data is not used by competing providers for discussion or coordination of provider prices or costs.
Damn. From 1996!
>> Businesses should be required to compete and to opeerate in competitive markets.
I'm not sure I understand where you are going with this? Are you suggesting that a new product cannot enter a market without a number of simultaneous competitors?
If I want to roll out fibre to an area that doesn't have it, can I? If I want to build a fresh-produce store in a town that doesn't have one, then I need to find someone else to compete with?
Lots and lots of businesses operate as quasi-monopolies if you look hard enough. Especially in smaller and rural environments. Lots and lots of places have one gas station, one mechanic, one vet, one doctor, one diner and so on.
Your use of the word "require" seems difficult to implement. What if no-one wants to compete with me? If Apple stops making Macs, does MS have to stop making Windows?
I agree that those are challenges. Maintaining competition in markets is well-studied; I wonder what has been found - what can be done, how can the scope be limited without failing on the outcomes, etc.
I am seeing a funny skit where the city is busting some bougie coop for having way too high of prices.
RealPage's competition were doing the exact same thing and completely escaped oversight or retribution. The rental market is corrupt and crooked nationwide, and these lawsuits flubbed a chance at making a real change.
Not that it wasn't predictable. Follow the money: who owns the property and REITs that rely on squeezing renters for every cent? Certainly not lawyers, judges, and politicians. /s
I leased at two RealPage properties for a combined 151 months. Both of them were confirmed to be colluding with one another and they were both confirmed as “high software collusion” by an expert. I calculated that the max payout I could get is ~$83,000 for the estimated amount I was overcharged rent for those ~12 years.
Can’t wait to get like $300 out of this. /s
It's both funny and sad to see the mental gymnastics of people trying to find solutions to this when the solution is real simple: it's public ownership.
Housing needs to be decommodified. It needs to stop being a retirement plan. We need to stop letting people hoard it. We need to stop subsidizing exurbs and making it illegal to build the kind of walkable communities people actually like. Case in point: Red Vienna [1].
As another commenter noted, this is in every industry. Utilities are a particularly bad one including telcos. All the best ISPs in the US are municipally owned. Chattanooga was the first really big poster child for this.
Privatization of all these things is just rent-seeking behavior.
So many of society's problems come down to housing being too expensive. Anything that makes it expensive needs to be stamped out and that includes RealPage as well as Airbnb/VRBO.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY&t=191s
It is not just housing but all land - the grocery store ups prices without increasing profit because every landowner in the supply chain (who they rent their stores from, their warehouses, the factories that process and package foods, the farms themselves) ups rent too.
This is a predictable outcome of commerce due to the limited supply of land and is described in some detail by Adam Smith and developed by later thinkers like Riccardo and George (who took it to its logical conclusion and inspired the board game Monopoly).
During the 20th century, economics was wholesale rewritten to blur the lines between land and capital so as to bury this awkward conversation.
The general recommendation of these early economists was taxing land - moderate in the case of Smith, up to 100% per George. This amounts to public ownership of part of the profits of land ownership.
... and the term for this behavior gives it away: "rent-seeking".
> It's both funny and sad to see the mental gymnastics of people trying to find solutions to this when the solution is real simple: it's public ownership.
No, it is not. Communism tried that and all communist countries failed spectacularly. Public ownership in practice means that everyone has rights but zero responsibilities.
Taking people's private property is not a solution to any crisis. This whole housing thing looks like "I want to have my cake and eat it too".
I wonder about the failure of the PRC while heaving 500 million out of poverty the last 50 years. Interesting failure mode.
PRC isn't communist.
But then USSR wasn't really communist either, it was far more defined by dictatorship of individuals; which is diametrically opposed to communism.
If you have people living in palaces whilst others starve then you don't have communism - the first principle of which is that benefit of labour is split under egalitarian principles. Whilst rich people getting richer, and the devaluing of people typifies capitalism.
From my considerations, we need to limit wage disparity, eg by a top rate of tax at 100% (I know how that will be received here!). That limits power that can be accrued through wealth too - no more billionaires who can by elections. We also need to give ownership of the benefits of labour to the people; wage limits does that, but a more direct link is possible too and that can aid transition from Western Capitalism to a more equal distribution of wealth. Ultimately, globally we're going to face far more issues with migration as the effects of our past excesses take hold; redistribution of wealth across nations also needs to be accepted if we're going to manage that transition with less war and bloodshed.
I thought it was all about who owns the means of production. I guess it was palaces and poverty all along; learned something new.
[flagged]