I was impressed by most of this article in Curbed, which did some actual reporting on the discrepancy between landlords saying rents in New York City were surging "because people came flooding back" and the fact that, according to all data, people did not actually come flooding back. The reporting goes to impressive shoe-leather lengths -- the author even contacts the New York City Water Board for clarification on how much waste they processed in 2021! Then comes the end, which identifies the culprit as The Algorithm -- specifically, that of RealPage, a Texas-based "property management software" company that sells software-as-a-service to computerize the process of landlords doing landlord shit -- and leaves it there. This section of the article contains a lot of "it's hard to know who all their customers are" and "if this happened, it could do this" speculation, but few specifics. Naturally, I wanted to know more.
(source: RealPage's training video for AI Revenue Management, 2022; it just gets more infuriating from here, folks)
"It's not collusion if we just happen to all use the same arm's length software company to suggest to us what others are charging/paying and thus what the "market rate" ought to be!"
Rent-fixing happens when all the institutional landlords just "happen" to agree rents should go up at the same time because the Algorithm said so. If you're wondering how employers get away with what ought to be illegal wage-fixing -- they pay databank companies to find out what others are paying, and report their own pay structures to those companies to ensure that nobody is out of step with what the "rest of market" is paying.
They never talk directly to their peers, but the central data broker is absolutely in effect doing that for each firm to collude.
