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

 

[Longmile149]

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.

Personally, I like doubling your property taxes for every home you own that you don’t live in 8 months out of the year.

In the case of apartment buildings/complexes, the entire building counts as a single unit for the doubling, but C-level execs (or the appropriate parallel) living in a building 8+ months reduce the unit count by 1 to a minimum of 1.

Own six apartment complexes in Detroit and live in a house in Ann Arbor?

Your home = property taxes x1
Apt 1 = x2
Apt 2 = x4
Apt 3 = x8
Etc

 

[Longmile149]

Also:

RealPage brags that clients—who agree to provide RealPage real-time access to sensitive and nonpublic data—experience “rental rate improvements, year over year, between 5% and 12% in every market,” the lawsuit said.

Burn these motherfuckers to the ground and salt the earth where we scatter the ashes.

Burn down their homes and businesses, too.

 

[Longmile149]

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.

Personally, I like doubling your property taxes for every home you own that you don’t live in 8 months out of the year.

In the case of apartment buildings/complexes, the entire building counts as a single unit for the doubling, but C-level execs (or the appropriate parallel) living in a building 8+ months reduce the unit count by 1 to a minimum of 1.

Own six apartment complexes in Detroit and live in a house in Ann Arbor?

Your home = property taxes x1
Apt 1 = x2
Apt 2 = x4
Apt 3 = x8
Etc

Sounds good, except we own a condo we "lease" to my mother-in-law. Her rent is about ten percent of what we pay, because that is what she can afford.

My parents have a similar situation where they rent a house to my step sister for their mortgage payment.

My fantasy legislation is open to some amendments re: family members, charity, and the like.

 

[Longmile149]

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.

Personally, I like doubling your property taxes for every home you own that you don’t live in 8 months out of the year.

In the case of apartment buildings/complexes, the entire building counts as a single unit for the doubling, but C-level execs (or the appropriate parallel) living in a building 8+ months reduce the unit count by 1 to a minimum of 1.

Own six apartment complexes in Detroit and live in a house in Ann Arbor?

Your home = property taxes x1
Apt 1 = x2
Apt 2 = x4
Apt 3 = x8
Etc

Sounds good, except we own a condo we "lease" to my mother-in-law. Her rent is about ten percent of what we pay, because that is what she can afford.

My parents have a similar situation where they rent a house to my step sister for their mortgage payment.

My fantasy legislation is open to some amendments re: family members, charity, and the like.

I've stopped tracking our costs, because she will never pay us enough for the tax implications to manifest. The good news is that she is 40 minutes closer to us, and can walk to our house if she wants her grandson fix. We also bought at a time when the mortgage was about a thousand dollars less than rent on a similar apartment. HOA fees cut that in half, but her quality of life has improved. Prior to moving, my wife would need to go to the hospital with her every other month or so. There have been no such trips since she moved closer to us.

I bet the stress reductions from the alleviated financial burden, isolation, and looming loss of independence have been huge. I’m really glad.

The house my stepsister is renting from my folks is the one we lived in as kids. My dad and his wife bought my stepmom’s brothers: house from his estate when he died, but they couldn’t sell the old house because the 08 bubble popping put them underwater on it. My stepsister and her husband couldn’t get approved for a mortgage and the rents for a similar home were almost double, so they basically just took over the payments. When it’s paid off, the plan is to sign it over to them.

If they didn’t have that available, they’d probably have been homeless a long time ago.

The entire housing market is deeply, deeply fucked up because of the investment mentality that landlords and property rental companies have.

 

[Longmile149]

Funny, where I work we dropped RealPage because they couldn't do simple AP functions properly for the one property they were hired for. A high school student could have done a better job paying bills on time

The shady cartel that makes money by driving families into homelessness and poverty by price fixing and market manipulation isn’t great about making sure their own bills are paid?

I, for one, am very surprised.

 

[Longmile149]

I'd like to know how much profit landlords made in 2000, 2010 and 2020. Was the profit the same in these 20 years?

Did the pricing rise due to things outside their control, so their profit has always been the same? Or has their profit increased every year they raise the rent? I think this information could have a detrimental affect on the case.

If you’re asking if the cost of home ownership has risen at the same rate as the cost of rent, the answer is no, not even close.

They justify raising rents by pretending that making a smaller profit by not extorting the maximum possible rent from every tenant is the same as losing money.

It’s literally what the lawsuit is about. They collude with landlords and rental companies via their software to increase rates across the entire country to ensure that no renters can find lower rates, guaranteeing that all their associated morherfu…sorry, client landlords can extract maximum rents without competing with one another.

They brag about 5-12% yoy returns.

Five to twelve percent increases *every year.*