Company That Makes Rent-Setting Software For Apartments Accused of Collusion, Lawsuit Says (propublica.org) 116
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: Renters filed a lawsuit (PDF) this week alleging that a company that makes price-setting software for apartments and nine of the nation's biggest property managers formed a cartel to artificially inflate rents in violation of federal law. The lawsuit was filed days after ProPublica published an investigation raising concerns that the software, sold by Texas-based RealPage, is potentially pushing rent prices above competitive levels, facilitating price fixing or both. [...] RealPage's software uses an algorithm to churn through a trove of data each night to suggest daily prices for available rental units. The software uses not only information about the apartment being priced and the property where it is located, but also private data on what nearby competitors are charging in rents. The software considers actual rents paid to those rivals -- not just what they are advertising, the company told ProPublica.
ProPublica's investigation found that the software's design and reach have raised questions among experts about whether it is helping the country's biggest landlords indirectly coordinate pricing -- potentially in violation of federal law. In one neighborhood in downtown Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of more than 9,000 apartments were controlled by just 10 property managers, who all used RealPage pricing software in at least some of their buildings. RealPage told ProPublica that the company "uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner." The company also said that landlords who use employees to manually set prices "typically" conduct phone surveys to check competitors' rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior. "RealPage's revenue management solutions prioritize a property's own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors' rents," a company statement said, "and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing."
The lawsuit said that RealPage's software helps stagger lease renewals to artificially smooth out natural imbalances in supply and demand, which discourages landlords from undercutting pricing achieved by the cartel. Property managers "thus held vacant rental units unoccupied for periods of time (rejecting the historical adage to keep the 'heads in the beds') to ensure that, collectively, there is not one period in which the market faces an oversupply of residential real estate properties for lease, keeping prices higher," it said. Such staggering helped the group avoid "a race to the bottom" on rents, the lawsuit said. 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. RealPage encourages property companies to have daily calls with a RealPage pricing adviser and discourages deviating from the rent price suggested by the software, the lawsuit said. A RealPage representative told ProPublica that the company "strongly denies the allegations and will vigorously defend against the lawsuit."
RealPage "uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner." The company also said that landlords who use employees to manually set prices "typically" conduct phone surveys to check competitors' rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior.
"RealPage's revenue management solutions prioritize a property's own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors' rents," a company statement said, "and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing."
ProPublica's investigation found that the software's design and reach have raised questions among experts about whether it is helping the country's biggest landlords indirectly coordinate pricing -- potentially in violation of federal law. In one neighborhood in downtown Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of more than 9,000 apartments were controlled by just 10 property managers, who all used RealPage pricing software in at least some of their buildings. RealPage told ProPublica that the company "uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner." The company also said that landlords who use employees to manually set prices "typically" conduct phone surveys to check competitors' rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior. "RealPage's revenue management solutions prioritize a property's own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors' rents," a company statement said, "and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing."
The lawsuit said that RealPage's software helps stagger lease renewals to artificially smooth out natural imbalances in supply and demand, which discourages landlords from undercutting pricing achieved by the cartel. Property managers "thus held vacant rental units unoccupied for periods of time (rejecting the historical adage to keep the 'heads in the beds') to ensure that, collectively, there is not one period in which the market faces an oversupply of residential real estate properties for lease, keeping prices higher," it said. Such staggering helped the group avoid "a race to the bottom" on rents, the lawsuit said. 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. RealPage encourages property companies to have daily calls with a RealPage pricing adviser and discourages deviating from the rent price suggested by the software, the lawsuit said. A RealPage representative told ProPublica that the company "strongly denies the allegations and will vigorously defend against the lawsuit."
RealPage "uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner." The company also said that landlords who use employees to manually set prices "typically" conduct phone surveys to check competitors' rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior.
"RealPage's revenue management solutions prioritize a property's own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors' rents," a company statement said, "and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing."
solidarity forever (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine if tenants got together, had a little meeting and then formed a, oh I don't know, like a ... Union?
Turn around and fuck those cunts right back up the ass .
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No I don't know how that math works out stop asking questions.
Seriously, there was just a study that showed lifetime earnings for Union members are 1.3 million more than non-union even accounting for education levels. If you crank lifetime union dues to absurd levels you might get to $150,000, might.
And for everyone asking me the link to study for God's sakes just Google i
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there was just a study that showed lifetime earnings for Union members are 1.3 million more than non-union even accounting for education levels.
That sounds interesting: if you spread the 1.3 million over say 40 years of wages, this means an union job gets on average $32500 more per year than the equivalent non-union job. I'm not surprised companies aren't keen on unions if they would need to basically double some low level salaries.
Re:solidarity forever (Score:5, Informative)
It sounds impossible, because it is. rsilvergun brought up that study before, and refused to cite it. It's apparently the study described at https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13... [npr.org], which (a) is based on people who retired years ago, (b) excluded women and (c) compared people across jobs -- so a non-union janitor was compared to a union auto factory worker. The 1.3 million difference is really due to the jobs people do, not whether they're in a union. There was also this finding:
Inversely, people with college degrees who have been in a union for more than half their careers made less ($2.16 million) than those with college degrees who have never been in a union ($2.67 million), "likely because of the association of union membership and occupations worked," the study says.
Yes, joining a union makes a college degree worthless, according to this same study -- it reported lifetime earnings of $2.1 million for men who never joined a union.
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> (a) is based on people who retired years ago, (b) excluded women and (c) compared people across jobs -- so a non-union janitor was compared to a union auto factory worker.
This covers all of those: "Union Incomes May Seem Better Than Non-Union, But Are They Really?" https://www.forbes.com/sites/e... [forbes.com]
The further from retirement the more gain, women gain more than men, and the need to not compare apples and oranges.
Overall the picture is pretty positive for unions: "Bureau of labor statistics - 2021" https [bls.gov]
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That BLS press release points out another confounding effect: A disproportionate number of union members come from high-cost states like Hawaii, New York and California, so that will also make union salaries look better in comparison.
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> That BLS press release points out another confounding effect: A disproportionate number of union members come from high-cost states like Hawaii, New York and California, so that will also make union salaries look better in comparison.
Makes sense, maybe more a factor than a confound, but either way it doesn't negate the gains. Just how big the gains are.
They're still pretty big.
And I'd guess it's even more so, the more employers are indiscriminately just trying to minimize wages to maximize profits.
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Yes, joining a union makes a college degree worthless
That's not what that says. That says that unions are associated with occupations which have lower salaries than what is otherwise available to people who have college degrees. This should surprise no one.
As for your other criticisms: I don't see how (a) or (b) contradicts the conclusions made by the study, and (c) just isn't true. They're not comparing one single job against another single job, they're comparing populations. People who work union jobs tend to make more than people who don't work union jo
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That's not what that says.
It says that people who never join a union averaged $2.1M in lifetime earnings, and those with college degrees who spent at least half their career in a union averaged $2.16M. The combination of college degree and union membership wash out.
I don't see how (a) or (b) contradicts the conclusions made by the study, and (c) just isn't true.
(a) and (b) do not directly contradict the conclusions -- but they are important limitations. As noted in the Forbes article linked just up-thread, the differences change a lot if you look at more recent numbers or at women. (c) absolutely is true: The study averaged t
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joining a union makes a college degree worthless
When, in fact, what the study authors said was that union jobs pay less than what college graduates could otherwise make. It has nothing to do with the union, and everything to do with the type of jobs that unions represent.
Your demand for your own version of an "apples to apples" comparison can't be done in the way that you want. Even if you narrowed your focus to a single person, a given union janitor is going to be working in a different place for a different company under differe
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I pointed you to the exact numbers from the study that support what I said, and you insist on looking at other numbers instead. Why?
The study authors didn't try to make any of the corrections for confounding effects that you suggest, because they have a narrative that they want to tell. Comparing janitors in union shops to janitors in non-union shops would be at least a start at a fair comparison, even if it ignores the effects of sex and location and old data and all the other confounders that were alread
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"likely because of the association of union membership and occupations worked," the study says
This is the part that you quoted, but seem to be misinterpreting.
Comparing janitors in union shops against janitors in non-union shops is an arbitrary threshold. It has all of same problems, and the same solution. There's no way for the study authors to know that this particular threshold is the one which will satisfy you.
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Seriously, there was just a study that showed lifetime earnings for Union members are 1.3 million more than non-union even accounting for education levels.
Your study doesn't prove what you claim it does, it literally ignored half the working population and treated EVERY JOB as equal, janitor, engineer, etc.
It is telling how you spend more time demeaning those that ask you to support your claims/cite your study when the obvious response is to simply cite the study - and not a report on the study, the actual study.
This is the 2022 version of the often mid-represented "a woman earns 72 cents for every dollar a man makes" study.
Tenants rights are weak in much of the USA (Score:1)
Imagine if tenants got together, had a little meeting and then formed a, oh I don't know, like a ... Union?
In some - maybe all - US states, your lease is in default if you withhold rent without one of a very few legally-allowed reasons. When the lease comes up for renewal at the new, higher rate your landlord can say "take it or leave it."
Unless you live in a jurisdiction that provides strong protections for tenant-unions, unionization usually won't work in today's landlord-friendly market.
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Re:Tenants rights are weak in much of the USA (Score:4, Interesting)
I understand. I've lived in places where tenants had strong protections and the local city-wide tenants union actually had some muscle. I've also lived in places where it will be nearly impossible for a tenant's union to succeed unless:
* the landlord is financially weak
* the landlord is not diversified / doesn't have other sources of income that won't be affected by a rent strike
* the landlord had other issues, such as code violations, that are going to make it vulnerable
* it's a "renter's market" - which it is not right now in most of the USA.
Bottom line for those who live in areas without strong tenant-protection laws: If the landlord is financially healthy and there are no issues like code violations getting it unwanted attention, it will be free to raise rates and the only real choices tenants will have will be "renew or not renew" when their lease is up. The cost of a "rent strike" is just too high and the odds of success are very close to zero.
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If a whole building stops paying rent, 90 days later, there are a lot of new tenants and the building owner has a bunch of people he can now not just collect three months of back rent, but other fees. With how bill collecting can be offshored, even if someone pays the bill collector, the apartment owner can still ding their credit until the apartment owner is paid as well, even though they sold the debt off.
If you don't want to live anywhere other than a bridge, feel free to do this.
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Imagine if tenants got together, had a little meeting and then formed a, oh I don't know, like a ... Union?
Imagine if tenants got together, had a little meeting, and decided to stop voting against their own interests.
The solution to high rents is an increased supply of high-density housing in urban areas where most renters want to live.
If you vote against pro-growth politicians, construction of urban housing is blocked, and instead, you get suburban sprawl where no one wants to rent.
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The suburban sprawl around here has ~1% vacancy rate. Even with public transport options being crap.
But yeah, it's a simple supply/demand economic. The (newly gentrified) city dwellers vote to stop high-rises. The new condos near the amusement park got the park under a curfew because of the noise.
It's like people move somewhere they want to change rather than moving somewhere they want to live.
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"It's like people move somewhere they want to change rather than moving somewhere they want to live"
The tyranny of gentrification
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The suburban sprawl around here has ~1% vacancy rate.
No, it doesn't. No city has a rental vacancy rate that low.
An average tenant stays for three years. It takes an average of 90 days to clean up the apartment, put it on the market, find a tenant, and wait for them to move in.
That means a 10% vacancy rate in a good market.
A 1% vacancy rate would mean an average of nine days between one tenant moving out and the next tenant moving in. That doesn't happen.
Re:solidarity forever (Score:4, Informative)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se... [stlouisfed.org]
Re: solidarity forever (Score:3)
Australia, national,
zero point nine percent [sqmresearch.com.au].
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When you pull numbers out of your ass, they tend to be shitty.
https://www.census.gov/housing... [census.gov] (in particular the "Historical Tables") say that 10% vacancy only ever happened intermittently, in the 2000s -- historically it's been somewhat higher than it is now, so it's a seller's market at the moment.
Re: solidarity forever (Score:2)
Given the number of home sales has almost completely collapsed, I'd say it's not either a buyer or seller market.
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The suburban sprawl around here has ~1% vacancy rate. Even with public transport options being crap.
But yeah, it's a simple supply/demand economic. The (newly gentrified) city dwellers vote to stop high-rises. The new condos near the amusement park got the park under a curfew because of the noise.
It's like people move somewhere they want to change rather than moving somewhere they want to live.
In my neck of the woods, the story is "Farmer sells off some property to create a housing development. People living in development complain about the farm smell and sue the farmer to put him out of business"
Re: solidarity forever (Score:2)
Put it in a covenant.
Also, why would you sell farmland for housing? Either farming or housing is going to be more profitable. Figure out which one and do that.
Re: solidarity forever (Score:2)
If I sell off 100 acres for 5 million dollars, I don't need to sell my other 400 acres no matter how much it's worth.
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If I sell off 100 acres for 5 million dollars, I don't need to sell my other 400 acres no matter how much it's worth.
And there is the retirement fund. A lot of farmers are nearing retirement age, and if you can get a nice quick nest egg going, there ya are. And if you take the one time capital gains write-off, it's even better.
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Put it in a covenant.
Also, why would you sell farmland for housing? Either farming or housing is going to be more profitable. Figure out which one and do that.
So much farmland around here has been sold for development. During the 1990's and early oughts, it was a great way for the farmer to generate money. It was a retirement money generator. You sell it to a developer, the developer built a bunch of McMansions, idjits would buy them, and viola.
I've always wondered what was going to happen to this land after the midwest started tailing off in productivity, and it was needed again. Those McMansions aren't all that popular these days.
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The solution to high rents is an increased supply of high-density housing in urban areas where most renters want to live
No, the solution is fewer people. Reduce the population so there is more supply of housing than there are people. Rents and house prices will fall. Wages will also increase [fantasticfacts.net] as employers seek to fill jobs.
Re: solidarity forever (Score:2)
So we can live in a continual pandemic economy? No, thanks.
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So we can live in a continual pandemic economy? No, thanks.
What the hell are you talking about? How would having fewer people lead us to live in a "pandemic economy" (whatever that is)?
With fewer people wages would rise, housing would be far more affordable, there would be less pollution, more resources for everyone. You know, the opposite of what we have now.
Re: solidarity forever (Score:2)
Because of entire society is built for a population of its current size. When you lose people, your infrastructure starts to crumble. Populations start to empty from some places, leading to a snowball of disinvestment. Once the laborers have left to find opportunity, those remaining can no longer get basic services because the working class fled.
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Imagine if tenants got together, had a little meeting and then formed a, oh I don't know, like a ... Union?
Turn around and fuck those cunts right back up the ass .
The next thing you'll be saying is that we should have elected representative that looks after their own interests instead of rich donors.
Madness.
Re: solidarity forever (Score:2)
The problem is if you try to do a rent strike, they'll just stagger the evictions and replace everyone with paying customers.
Unions work because they have a union contract. Leasing contracts would have to be completely overhauled to support renter's unions.
Re: solidarity forever (Score:2)
Yeah, they could all threaten to be homeless.
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I don't think organized tenants have nearly the leverage you seem to think they do.
Pretend you are a landlord.
Say one of your tenants withholds rent because "The Rent Is Too Damn High"
Tenant is kicked out of apartment, needs to find a new apartment, but can't use last landlord as reference.
Tenant struggles to find a place to live because landlords don't like to rent to people who view rent as optional.
Yay, tenant no longer pays rent, but is also heading towards homelessness until they save up enough to make
Yet another example where a crime is committed (Score:5, Interesting)
In this case if the landlords get together and fix prices that's clearly a crime but if somebody makes a app where the landlords all upload their prices and then all the landlords check each other's prices using that app suddenly we're arguing whether it's legal or not.
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It is apparently not collusion, if you never actual talk to the people you are colluding with because everyone deals with a middleman who collects the data and then shares it back.
Price transparency and information sharing are legal.
Collusion is an agreement between competitors, "If you do X, I'll do Y."
That isn't happening. There is no agreement. There is no quid pro quo. There is no penalty for defecting.
Re:Yet another example where a crime is committed (Score:5, Insightful)
Price transparency and information sharing are legal.
That's entirely dependent upon context and purpose, and this is why actual lawyers, with licenses and such, say "it depends".
Collusion is an agreement between competitors, "If you do X, I'll do Y."
That isn't happening. There is no agreement. There is no quid pro quo. There is no penalty for defecting.
First, there is very much an agreement to conditionally share insider information, which itself can be used as evidence of collusion. From TFA:
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.
Appointing a third party as the collective point of contact doesn't constitute a get-out-of-antitrust-law-free card. An agreement need not involve parties actually sending someone over to the offices of the others to get a handshake in order to amount to price-fixing. No smoky back room is required - the individual behavior of the companies toward the same end, that of artificially raising rents based on this communal - and exclusive - information pool, can be used to make an antitrust case. The companies are not interested in that insider information because they are short of reading material on the toilet, and can't find that Time subscription card they snagged at the dentist's office. If they are collectively using it for an improper purpose, that may very well be found to be collusion.
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very much an agreement to conditionally share insider information
Prevailing rents are not "insider information."
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Re: Yet another example where a crime is committed (Score:2)
It is happening because the software is looking at multiple properties and then suggesting rates to everyone based on that. That means using the software is price fixing.
Re: Yet another example where a crime is committe (Score:1)
Re: Yet another example where a crime is committ (Score:2)
But they ARE leaving units vacant to prop up the price. That's the point of the software. It's marketed to property managers exactly like that.
Re: Yet another example where a crime is commit (Score:2)
And the software collects data from all its users, so it acts as a central source.
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Rents are the same. Kids feel entitled to live in a hip place, and have the e lendable income to pay for it. There is no crime in charging what the market will bear. If there were no takers, rents would go down. I often pay half of what others pay by choosing to live a few blocks outside the hip place. My high rise was $1,000 and
Re:Yet another example where a crime is committed (Score:5, Insightful)
Kids feel entitled to live in a hip place
Have you ever watched Friends?
A group of twentysomethings working minimum wage jobs live in a spacious luxury apartment in the heart of NYC.
People grow up watching TV shows that give them a distorted view of economic reality.
Re:Yet another example where a crime is committed (Score:5, Insightful)
When we were Young the government was investing trillions in infrastructure spending to build new cities. That in turn built so many houses and apartments that the super wealthy couldn't corner the market on housing like they can now.
After 30 or 40 years of austerity politics and tax cuts for the rich we no longer build things in this country. That makes it both possible and practical for the ultra wealthy to buy up all the houses and apartments and rent them back to us at huge markups.
I keep saying this but the kids aren't going to keep putting up with this for much longer. They're either going to get a new new deal or they're going to get violent and install a dictator. Dictators are great fun until they go off The rocker and start doing things like starving half the population we're sending you off the fight pointless wars
Re:Yet another example where a crime is committed (Score:5, Interesting)
After 30 or 40 years of austerity politics and tax cuts for the rich we no longer build things in this country.
The dearth of housing construction has nothing to do with austerity politics or tax cuts. There are plenty of private investors who would love permission to build urban housing.
The problem is that homeowners have figured out they can drive up their property values by voting for no-growth politicians.
I keep saying this but the kids aren't going to keep putting up with this for much longer.
Young voters in big cities are the most likely to vote for the no-growth policies that drive up their rents.
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There are plenty of private investors who would love permission to build urban housing.
Are there, though? Commercial property has historically been more profitable, so that's what most of them want to build anyway. Also, do they want to build affordable housing, or luxury suites for absentee rich fucks?
Re:Yet another example where a crime is committed (Score:5, Interesting)
Commercial property has historically been more profitable
Commercial property is more profitable per acre than single family housing.
It is not more profitable than highrise apartments.
But builders will build what they are permitted to build. If a city wants more housing, then it can issue permits for housing. If it wants more commercial property, it can issue permits for that. Voters oppose housing construction because it lowers their own property values, while commercial construction without concomitant housing construction raises residential property values.
Also, do they want to build affordable housing, or luxury suites
Even luxury apartments raise the total stock of housing. Rich people will buy them instead of other apartments, freeing up housing for those lower on the income scale.
But, again, builders will build what they are permitted to build. For most big cities, that means nothing. If a city wants fewer luxury apartments and more smaller/cheaper apartments, then that is what they can approve. But that is not popular with voters.
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Without government regulations and building businesses are free to create monopolies and monopolies are way more profitable than making new products
Re: Yet another example where a crime is committed (Score:1)
But builders will build what they are permitted to build. If a city wants more housing, then it can issue permits for housing. If it wants more commercial property, it can issue permits for that. Voters oppose housing construction because it lowers their own property values, while commercial construction without concomitant housing construction raises residential property values
A good argument for making zoning policy at the national, not local level.
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There's a lot of words there, but no evidence.
Show me the flood of denied permit applications.
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There are plenty of private investors who would love permission to build urban housing.
Are there, though? Commercial property has historically been more profitable, so that's what most of them want to build anyway. Also, do they want to build affordable housing, or luxury suites for absentee rich fucks?
I can note that in my area, there is no problem building high density housing. In fact, we have overbuilt a bit.
We have tended to operate on a boom/bust cycle of maybe a decade for as long as I can remember. With the university being the largest employer in the area, the developers are concerned that a new paradigm might be developing, given that things are changing, what with student loan forgiveness and what will the future hold - will there be a push for totally free education and room and board? The
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The *evil liberal* city of San Francisco generally requires apartment buildings on main streets to have commercial space on the ground floor. Some developers still build that stuff, and make money. Corporate types don't - they want unadorned warehouses for people. Probably wouldn't work in a place that doesn't have such expensive land, though, because the fire and other requirements associated with vertical mixed use can cost a bit to meet.
Commercial investors will not build (Score:2)
The problem is that traditionally these kind of parasites go too far and violence does break out. This is why we stopped them. FDR didn't do the New deal out of love and kindness. He might ha
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The upper crust have drones now. They're not afraid of us anymore. You can't bring an assault rifle to a drone fight
I have all along assumed that the reason they were regulating drones so hard is that drones are the major threat to every established order. And until effective countermeasures existed, they were essentially unstoppable. Even now, it's very difficult to counter a well designed drone. Aspect tracking is now cheap and easy with off the shelf hardware (at least COTS modules) and FOSS. It's still expensive to build big drones with big weapons and long loiter times, but it's very very cheap to build small ones w
It absolutely does (Score:2)
Under those circumstances what needs to happen to make affordable housing is that new cities need to be built. Those new cities are built by governments not by private companies. Governments do the really expensive and hard wo
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Nobody wants to live in high density housing. Everyone wants a house (England even has a word for it, a "detatched" house, which puzzles Americans because all houses are detached.)
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Nobody wants to live in high density housing.
So condos in SF and NYC sell for $2M because nobody wants them?
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> nothing to do with austerity politics or tax cuts.
Maybe not austerity politics but, while it's not technically a tax *cut* per se, Prop 13... aka: "We'd rather take four European vacations every year instead of just three. So let's cap our own taxes and leave later generations to pay the full rate and pick up the check for everything we benefit from after gutting the state's public services (including the schools that gave us our educations without crippling debt). And we'll severely retard housing c
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In practice, Prop 13 doesn't work that way. The olde fartz like me are relatively few and far between. However, the corporate landlords hold property even longer, and have gradually bought up most of the originally affordable neighborhoods turning them to rentals (and certainly using the software that heads this article to manage the places). Have seen that in my neighborhood, where 10% of the houses have original owners (from 25 years ago) and more than 50% are rentals. The landlords tend to keep places ev
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Kids feel entitled to live in a hip place
Have you ever watched Friends?
A group of twentysomethings working minimum wage jobs live in a spacious luxury apartment in the heart of NYC.
People grow up watching TV shows that give them a distorted view of economic reality.
We also went from Weezy Jefferson to Rachel Green...from Flo and Alice to Two Broke Chicks...I'd say it's more like TV shows offer a distorted view of all of reality.
And "reality" TV shows, rape that definition.
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Re:Yet another example where a crime is committed (Score:4, Insightful)
People grow up watching TV shows that give them a distorted view of economic reality.
I grew up reading Hardy Boys books and didn't realize it was abnormal to be knocked unconscious/bit by a venomous snake/kidnapped every week. My God, I hope Fenton Hardy had a good medical and behavioral policy.
For that matter, if I believed what I saw on TV, every relationship conflict could end in a hug in 25 or 45 minutes, police shot their guns every day, you could walk off a bullet wound, getting thrown through a window/wall doesn't hurt, and wild car chases wouldn't result in dozens of fatalities.
Everything portrayed in entertainment is wildly unrealistic, not just the housing. And it's hard to say which of it we absorb and believe even though we know it's total fantasy.
I must be getting old. My wife and I are binging Madame Secretary. It's a fun show but I keep getting distracted by wanting to shout "Negotiating that agreement would take months! You can't agree to it during a walk around the national mall!" That wouldn't have bothered me 30 years ago.
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Kids feel entitled to live in a hip place
Have you ever watched Friends?
A group of twentysomethings working minimum wage jobs live in a spacious luxury apartment in the heart of NYC.
People grow up watching TV shows that give them a distorted view of economic reality.
Pretty much this. Shows like Friends and Sex in the City have given a lot of people weird expectations.
If they plan to get their life goals based on Television shows, maybe they should watch The Honeymooners.
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Kids feel entitled to live in a hip place
Have you ever watched Friends?
A group of twentysomethings working minimum wage jobs live in a spacious luxury apartment in the heart of NYC.
People grow up watching TV shows that give them a distorted view of economic reality.
And pornography have given kids a distorted view of how quickly a plumber can get to your place.
If we try to show the world (Score:2)
Re: Yet another example where a crime is committed (Score:1)
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You obviously donâ(TM)t live in the Seattle area. $1,000 would get you a slumlord hovel multiple hours away from any decent job market, and possibly in anplace filled with dirty drug needles, drive-by shootings, rampant robberies, and other fun stuff. Itâ(TM)s so bad some people have to commute over mountain passes to get a break on rents, and even those areas are getting gentrified. These are families dealing with this, not âkids looking to live in the hip side of townâ(TM). That sort of situation would be very nice.
I agree, mostly. It's hard to find real stability. But I approached it a little differently.
I had the chance to work within the DC beltway area. It would have been a substantial raise. But the job I had at the time required travel to DC at times, and the cost of housing, goods, and that gaddammed commute if you live anywhere but the urban areas made it a non-starter.
What is more, a bit of sit down with a calculator showed that what I was getting paid already was better overall than what I would be maki
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They might not get away with it. Stay tuned.
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And they're in Texas, where no court will do anything against this kind of thing.
Posting data, is now illegal (Score:1)
However I am wondering why , facts are now illegal.
Re:Posting data, is now illegal (Score:4, Insightful)
Non-public data being used for price setting. Coordinated efforts to control supply of available units. Did you not RFS?
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I think you just used the article to validate , what is private. Show me the law.
While is sucks they did this, it is not illegal. It is just shows information is now used to charge more.
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The actual rents charged (as specified in individual lease agreements) are probably fairly reasonably considered private. Advertised rental rates are not, but actual rates may differ from advertised rates considerable.
Consumer protection laws often dictate how different corporate entities can set prices. Natural competition between diff
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People can, and do, claim a lot of dumb, wrong things in civil complaints. They're not legally right until a court rules on the question.
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The OP wanted to know what law (not necessarily for the complaint, but the previous OPs post), so I provided one possibility. That's why I said it might be a good place to start. Not definitive, not a precident, not right, not wrong, but a possibility.
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Well, the suit claims "The conspiracy Plaintiffs challenge is unlawful under Section 1 of the Sherman Act" (page 4, lines 23-24).That might be a good place to start.
What does Mr Peabody have to say about that though?
Known industry problem before this was prevalent (Score:5, Informative)
Once upon a time, I used to rent in downtown Denver. Talking with the office staff was very enlightening, mostly because they were space cadets and would openly admit that the various building management staff all across town all knew each other, talked with each other fairly regularly, and knew each other's pricing.
Every year, my rent would jump up about $250/mo, regardless of where I lived. If I moved to find a lower priced unit, the "deal" would last for the first year, and then would again start jumping up $250/mo at every renewal.
Then they all started using Real Pages to put their listings online. The only difference I actually noticed was that I was _finally_ able to grok why some units had a lower monthly rate, even though the sqft and layout was identical. The longer a unit remained vacant due to your move-in date, the higher the initial monthly rate would be -- ie, they were just rolling the months of "unpaid" rent before your lease started into your regular monthly rate. So, if you wanted a "deal" (for the first year), the trick was to find a unit that had only just become available, and sign a lease with a move in date within the next 30 days. Again, it didn't really matter, you'd see ~$250/mo increases at every renewal. Moving around was still the only way to get my rent to reset, and the first year "deal" became worse and worse as the years ticked by.
tldr; it didn't take software to make the price collusion happen. It only took software to make the collusion blatantly obvious and easily provable. Imnsho, the entire industry of "rental property management" is full to the very brim with rotten thieves at the top and clueless dolts at the very bottom that work for them. I'd say they deserve jail, but fuck that. They deserve class action lawsuits, permanent business license revocations, and THEN jail.
One of the quickest ways (Score:2)
Just facilitates and emergent phenomena (Score:2)
Basic economics the equilibrium price is the price you can't raise higher than and make a larger profit. In any given housing market for any given class of housing here will be an equilibrium price. This just lets the market find it faster. You can view it as facilitating the calculation of the price by sharing information that otherwise would not be available.
Complaining about it as a form of collusion is up there with complaining about magazines that list prices of real estate as a form of collusion as t
Collusion...? Really? (Score:1)
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a huge part of market is not using the software.
That's obviously not necessary for them to cause prices to rise.
The probability of this SW being able to change market price to some above-equilibrium level is close to 0.
That's a strange conclusion to come to. It only needs to cause a price to rise one time in one place for it to be a problem.
Eh? (Score:2)
Companies should not own "homes"! (Score:5, Insightful)
Individuals should not own more than one or two. Tax the rest of them with an insanely high tax.
Re: Companies should not own "homes"! (Score:1)
I feel the same way about apples. Limit one per week per person.
Re: Companies should not own "homes"! (Score:1)
Price Fixing is Price Fixing (Score:3)
RealPage Collusion (Score:2)
"RealPage's revenue management solutions prioritize a property's own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors' rents," a company statement said, "and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing."
Instead, we don't have the *risk* of collusion, we have a software program that does it for them automatically. It's no longer a risk, it's just a fact. Since we are doing it in software, over the internet, on a blockchain, surely it means we
No collusion here (Score:2)
Get real. It's a piece of software that suggests prices. No one forces landlords to use it or, if they do, to follow its recommendations.
Even if every landlord does use it, it's still not collusion. Collusion requires the landlords to make a pact to never rent for less.
And even if that happens to be true, it has nothing to do with the software, and everything to do with the landlords' pact.
The real problem, which no one seems willing or able to address, is zoning. Cities that make building difficult or
Re:or maybe its Bidens fault? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm gonna go ahead and, uh, disagree with you there. Rent has been skyrocketing in major hubs for at least the last 10 years. I watched it happen first-hand -- I was a renter in 2012, and rent hikes were going unabated back then, despite lack of any eviction moratorium. Hell, I watched my rent go up in 2009, as I watched the bank bailouts happening at the very same time. Those poor bank c-levels, they worked so very hard during that period, they definitely earned the bonuses that they carved out for themselves from those bailout checks. In fact, I watched my rent continue top jump annually at a rate that far outpaced my annual pay "raise", even when we were at 4% unemployment in 2017 & 2018.
So no, sorry not sorry, I cry zero tears for the property management companies (slum lords) that manage housing complexes these days.
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Rent has been skyrocketing in major hubs for at least the last 10 years
Along with everything else. We're getting poorer as time goes on.