Company that makes rent-setting software for landlords sued for collusion

RealPage worked with some of the nation’s largest landlords to raise rents, says lawsuit.

Read the whole story

 

[Uragan]

This one is interesting. I did a business exercise a few years ago where we had to figure out if gas stations posting their prices on the signs should count as collusion since their competitors can look and then adjust prices, and if that helps them raise prices and unofficially fix them as a group. This software reminds me of the same thing in that it's just a shortcut to looking at a bunch of price sheets.

Oh boy, just wait until you hear that Gas Stations have been using this exact same kind of software for a looooooong time (PriceAdvantage/Kalibrate). No need to even look out the window or adjust the prices yourself!

Maybe you should recommend to ProPublica that they write a story about that too.

(Edit: My comment isn't meant as snark, but a legit statement. If there's a problem with collusion within the gasoline market, that should be brought to light, just like they did with this situation.)

 

[Uragan]

Oh no.

Anyway...

Yes... rental property owners working together to crank up rent to an amount where people feel even more squeezed and/or live from paycheque to paycheque is such a non-problem that we should ignore.

 

[Uragan]

Next go after the airbnb and the home flippers. If you look at realstate listing, you literally see flippers taking 150k houses, apply fake wood floor and coat of paint then flipping it for 300k.

Stop buying 300K houses that sold for 150K a few months earlier?

Because it's the only house left after the comerical landlords brought everything? I can either pay a landlord a ridiculous price or own a home after paying a ridiculous price.

They bought everything? How about looking a few miles outside the area. Sometimes you just have to be willing to compromise.

Except everyone's going to be "looking a few miles outside the area" because a lot of people are being priced out of the market.

 

[Uragan]

This app certainly doesn’t help, but housing becoming a speculative asset to put money in and not a roof over your head is what caused this.

Break the big conglomerates and ban things like hotel houses and that will also help a lot.

Frankly, I'd go even further with single-family homes and make it ruinously expensive to own a house you don't live in. Eliminate the so-called passive-income aspect of home ownership and you get rid of landlords sitting on properties for years and letting them slowly decay until they can't squeeze any more money out of them. It'd be a lot easier for folks who just need a place to live if the market wasn't artificially inflated to suit the whims of capital.

I'll admit I don't have as neat a solution for apartments, and I think there should probably be some sort of rental market, but at the end of the day I think we, as a society, are going to have to start treating housing more like a right than a privilege before any of this gets meaningfully sorted out.

The PC government here actually did that, but who knows if that will actually do anything. (They predicted that it would take about two years to see the results of their tax plan.)

Honestly, I'd say that it is doubtful that it will have any meaningful impact though. Resale home prices were up 28% in 2021 from 2020. That is just eyewateringly crazy.

 

[Uragan]

Next go after the airbnb and the home flippers. If you look at realstate listing, you literally see flippers taking 150k houses, apply fake wood floor and coat of paint then flipping it for 300k.

Stop buying 300K houses that sold for 150K a few months earlier?

Do your homework when buying. Too many impulse sign because constrained inventory, pressure by realtors and others outbidding. Now we have Private Equity firms joining in the home purchasing to create portfolio of either rentals and/or resale to be the mortgager. Why have a lender like a bank (mortgages get traded like herpes nowadays) making the money when some PE can.

And about Flippers, go after the advertisers that sponsor these programs on cable. And states/counties that care more about making money off RADON tests than shoddy window installers.

Since you agree that it's a seller's market, me doing my homework may mean that someone else might swoop in and put in an offer on the property sight unseen.

 

[Uragan]

Interesting. When does a 'business idea' become an 'illegal racket'? Is this another sign of 'late stage capitalism'?

When someone’s idea or need to enrich themselves screws everyone else over in a major way. Yes, it’s LSC.

More of a matter of what Lindsey Graham said about why he kept blocking popular legislation in the Senate when he was Majority Leader.

"Because I can."

That's not an acceptable answer for doing anything that fucks over people.

Uh... when was Lindsey Graham ever the Senate Majority Leader?

 

[Uragan]

This one is interesting. I did a business exercise a few years ago where we had to figure out if gas stations posting their prices on the signs should count as collusion since their competitors can look and then adjust prices, and if that helps them raise prices and unofficially fix them as a group. This software reminds me of the same thing in that it's just a shortcut to looking at a bunch of price sheets.

Oh boy, just wait until you hear that Gas Stations have been using this exact same kind of software for a looooooong time (PriceAdvantage/Kalibrate). No need to even look out the window or adjust the prices yourself!

Maybe you should recommend to ProPublica that they write a story about that too.

(Edit: My comment isn't meant as snark, but a legit statement. If there's a problem with collusion within the gasoline market, that should be brought to light, just like they did with this situation.)

As a consumer, you can use say GasBuddy to know the prices as that is public information.

As others kept pointing out, the issue is the use of non-public data that the consumer does not have. It is like the SANTA FE Plug-in Hybrid EV US ad where the gas price is known but the price of the squeegee is not. When I lookup an apartment, there is no indication of actual rent as that lack any fees until I get the actual lease. Yet this software knows the exact rent including fees for similar apartments even those fees that are not provided to me. Then the landlord can provide a rent that the software predicts I would be willing to pay especially I had already visited the landlords who use the software.

But me using GasBuddy to find the cheapest gas isn't the same as gas stations (or conglomerates) using non-public software to figure out the optimal gas price to sell to me at.

 

[Uragan]

In a whole lot of industries, there is a sort of "soft cartel" anyhow. I mean, I do hope they bust this app and the landlords using it, but. . .

In most industries, there is at the minimum, all participants tracking the pricing of "the market" and raising prices accordingly.

I won't deny there are some industries like that, but I used to work for a company selling a commodity with only a few big vendors, and we tried pushing through price increases combined with a press release announcing the increase to the market. Instead of following our lead, our competitors dropped prices slightly, and we ended up losing 80% of our volume for the quarter. Didn't get it back until we reversed course and dropped prices below where we'd been before the announced price increase. And we had something like 30% market share before the announcement.

There are times when our prices and competitors prices all went up at the same time, but it was usually when someone's plant was down for whatever reason (repairs, normal upkeep, the olympics shuttering plants in china, etc.). Supply/demand economics do still work most of the time.

Airlines and other large businesses often do this sort of price signaling. Southwest will raise (or, less frequently, lower) the price on a given route and wait to see if their competitors match the change in price. If they do, then the new price becomes the new price.

Yeah... and not surprising, the airlines were recently sued for collusion for their ticket fares.

 

[Uragan]

Hmm what about capping rental prices at 30% of the combined income of the units renters. If you want to charge more, find higher income renters or allow more people on the lease per unit.

Just one more bad idea in an AOR that you have no expertise in...

 

[Uragan]

Interesting. When does a 'business idea' become an 'illegal racket'? Is this another sign of 'late stage capitalism'?

Tell me you believe in commie drivel without telling me you believe in commie drivel.

For future reference:

How to tell someone believes in commie drivel:
1) Uses the term 'late stage capitalism' unironically and without defining it (as if anyone should already know)
2) Thinks Banksy's art pieces have some deeper meaning (instead of the attention-seeking drivel it is)
3) Thinks this particular cartoon makes a fair point (to those who think it does, a negative net worth can potentially be a problem, but not being able to service ongoing expenses -including but not limited to debt repayments- is *definitely* a problem)
4) Makes lame wordplays with the word "our"

How to tell that someone believes in far-right drivel:
1) Anti-vaxxer
2) (US only) Has a seemingly inexplicable obsession about maintaining confederate monuments, especially ones built after the civil war. (Europe only) Collects WWII historical artifacts/memorabilia but only from the loser side of WWII.
3) Has a seemingly inexplicable obsession with people of Israeli citizenship and/or of Jewish religion acquiring any kind of position of responsibility, particularly so in the financial services sector
4) Use the term "LGBTQ+" followed by the word "cabal" or similar

And here is me, who wants to read some tech and gaming news without reading other people's drivel, but people can't help themselves from throwing their political driver at the fan. There is a reason most other tech and gaming sites (with the exception of Ars) explicitly don't allow any kind of "political discourse" in the comments.

Nobody cares. No one said you were obligated to read the comments section, much less leave a comment.

 

[Uragan]

Note, I don't want to defend the Soviet system in the slightest. I just think that their housing policy had some positive points, particularly the superblock style layout and the churning out massive numbers of prefab buildings to ease a housing crisis.

And of course we have to keep in mind the utter devastation left behind by World War II, and the long “reboot” that followed.

The extreme case would be Stalingrad (now Volgograd), the site of the (probably) bloodiest battle of all time, with the total death toll estimates varying by over half a million, from 1.25 to 1.80 million dead.

There wasn’t a habitable building of any kind left in the entire city, a vital important port town; while hindsight surely shows where they could have done better, the Soviet rebuild was overall a literally infinite improvement over the status quo and a net improvement over the pre-war housing stock for the non-elites.

That it came with Stalinism is tragic, but I suspect non-repressed ethnic Russians who lived there mostly saw the rebuild as a positive wonder.

It's a shame that the Soviets decided to back off on de-Stalinization after removing Khrushchev. His removal and the Era of Stagnation was a curse.