a cute fennec
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in reply to @NireBryce's post:
“RealPage’s influence is extensive, affecting rents for 70% of multi-family apartment buildings and 16 million units across the country.”
How are there only about 20 million apartments in a country of over 300 million people? That doesn’t seem right to me, even considering the massive amount of single family houses in this country.
it mentions multi-family apartment buildings, which are usually purpose-built instead of rowhouses or housing conversions
in reply to @NireBryce's post:
Wondering how well "the reason you're living in your van is because we just let landlords use blatantly obvious price-fixing schemes for like 25 years and 5 administrations." will go over.
Wait, how the fuck was RealPage supposed to work vs. how it worked in practice?
i think on the tin it's supposed to collect a bunch of data & give some algorithm to determine the rent you should charge to make the maximum amount of money. like, it's supposed to do the calculation of how much money you gain from higher rent and how much money you loose from vacant apartments, and give you a rent number to optimize total profit.
and i mean half of it's job is to do that as a machine, so no building manager has to feel guilty for choosing to raise rents - they can just do the thing the machine says is optimal.
now, how it actually works internally, i don't think we know? but in practice, when enough landlords use the company, what has ended up happening is that they tell all landlords to raise their rents about the same amount, and they do, which is the textbook definition of collusion.
I remember watching someone's video on it last year - and one of the points there was that in its terms of service they actually required landlords to change prices to recommended. If they didn't, they had to go through a lengthy process that nobody wpuld ever want to go through.
So it wasn't even that every user of the platform(?) wanted to be involved in price fixing - they just accepted TOS that required them to and made it heavily inconvenient to avoid raising rent.
Which is bullshit and should be illegal.
how it's supposed to work is it's supposed to provide an action line for landlords to follow in order to price fix rent nationwide. in practice landlords follow those recommendations. there really isn't anything else to it, there is actually no even halfway reasonable argument that it should be legal