There is an additional mechanism that creates this dynamic, where properties (especially commercial ones) are valued based on the price of leases. For this reason, it can be better for landlords to let a property stay empty with a higher listed rent than to let it open up, if they are renewing their lease or borrowing against it.
Your revenue in commercial real estate is imaginary. If your building is vacant 100% of the time for the year, your revenue is 12 months x your desired rent.
Then you have an expense of 12 months vacancy.
You can get loans based on your revenue.
Additionally, it's the reason you see concessions of 1-2 months free all the time - but landlords will never reduce the rent.
concessions are expenses. Revenue is 100% of their desired rent.
Perhaps instead of a covenant it could be more implicitly enforced by suggesting if there is a revenue drop they’ll revalue the property and force the landlord to make up the difference which could be financially ruinous for some.
Can't they extend the trick, so that they have one unit that rents at $100B that always has the vacancy expense of $100B? Then they can set the other rents as they like with little impact to their revenue
The commercial landlord financial infrastructure is broken, but gameable.
Also, a land value tax would fix this (and many other real estate market distortions)
The second is when you get together and say, “1bd studios are $1200, agreed?” This explicit coordination is illegal. IANAL, but this looks closer to the second.
Not "perfectly". I think some companies have gotten into trouble doing this.
Smart move: vacant properties are devoid of voters.
There is something very wrong with a software based price fixing cartel.
Sure seems like RealPage is price fixing then
Essentially, one can configure RealPage (and RealPage seems to make this suggestion) to use their auto-price tool by default and require management approvals if employees want to set the price to something else.
If I'm buying a Playstation at Walmart, chances are the person at the checkout counter can't change the price directly and give me a discount. They probably can call over a manager who could approve a price change because they can see I'm a really cool person who should get $50 off this Playstation.
I agree the article is very clear. The approvals team is the management of the property.
From the article:
> If there is a disagreement between the participating Lessor and the RealPage Pricing Advisor, the dispute is often elevated to the Lessor’s management for resolution, and specific reasons justifying a departure from RealPage’s pricing level are usually required.
This snippet is in the "..." from the above comment. Funny they snipped out this extremely critical part of the quote to show who does the approval.
Where does it say RealPage employees need to approve the price?
> Specifically, every morning, RealPage provides participating Lessors with recommended price levels. Lessors typically must communicate to a RealPage “Pricing Advisor” that they have “accept[ed]” or “confirm[ed] the “approved pricing” within a specified time frame. If Lessors wish to diverge from the “approved pricing” they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval. RealPage encourages participating Lessors to have daily calls between the Lessors’ employees with pricing responsibility and the RealPage Pricing Advisor.
So every day an employee at the Lessor must tell a Pricing Advisor -- a flesh-and-blood RealPage employee -- that they accept the pricing provided by RealPage. Further, to reject the pricing, they must explain to the Pricing Advisor why they are rejecting the pricing in writing.
It IS confusing because it goes on to say in the following paragraph that said requests also require further approval from a manager at the Lessor.
Given that it says "If there is a disagreement between the participating Lessor and the RealPage Pricing Advisor..." I'd say the Pricing Advisor isn't able to just wholesale deny it or delay it. As the leasing agent, you'd just choose to deny that price, put in a comment about how its a unit that we haven't been able to move in forever and every tour over the last six months leads to people saying the unit is way overpriced", and then that comment would get sent to your manager for approval or rejection.
> Lessors must communicated to a RealPage pricing advisor that they have accepted or confirmed the approved pricing
Okay, so the Lessor is directly communicating with a RealPage employee.
>If Lessors wish to diverged from the approved pricing they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval
How could this same Lessor be getting approval from anyone other than that employee?
Because it tells you who the dispute gets escalated to in that next paragraph, and it's not that RP employee.
> If there is a disagreement between the participating Lessor and the RealPage Pricing Advisor, the dispute is often elevated to the Lessor’s management for resolution
If the employee has permissions to just set the price, they can just set the price. If they don't, which a lot don't, the dispute gets sent to their manager who does have the rights to set the prices.
RP knows there's a disagreement on the price, so they can update their models and understand why the property disagrees with the generated prices, but they're not directly enforcing their generated prices. They do strongly encourage the generated prices though and do pressure the property to stick to the price, but ultimately it does not require approval from the RP employee.
I'm just stating this idea that many seem to have here that these prices are being enforced behind RealPage support agents manually approving price changes is incorrect. In fact, property managers can choose to just not use this price tool at all, and manually set their prices, which can also require employees to submit approvals for price changes.
The whole "await approval" thing isn't the problem, that's just normal for lots of places. Lots of places require some kind of management approval to adjust prices.
Just like the person at the checkout counter can't just arbitrarily sell me a PS5 for $5.
Still, the impression given to the property's management team is that a person (possibly a customer service grunt) is doing some kind of "final review," manually clicking a box or even just making sure they don't drop below 80% acceptance.
Or making sure their leasing agents aren't issuing leases that will lose the company money.
If the building's budgets are based around leasing apartments at at least $2/sqft, and leasing agents start issuing leases at $1.50/sqft without anyone else knowing or approving, there's going to be a problem. Those leasing agents aren't always privy (or even care to know) about the budgets of the building.
If a waiter starts selling the $5 hamburgers for $1, do you think the business is going to do well? Should the waiter have the ability to arbitrarily decide menu prices?
This is a cartel going around making sure that all the businesses are playing ball, so they can set prices for everyone how they see fit.
It's difficult to imagine a reason why a property owner should have to appeal to "management" to vary the prices of their own asset that doesn't involve "management" being an cartel body.
Similarly, if that store manager at Walmart you mentioned had to seek approval from the same advisor that does prices for K-mart and Target to adjust the amount on the till, I don't think one could argue that this wasn't price fixing so long as he was still able to get you the discount by petitioning the Walton Family...
Nowhere in here did it say these people needing to submit the approvals had pricing responsibility. Even if you did have people manually create the prices you'd probably still require your front line leasing agents to submit approvals for listed prices. In this case, those with the pricing responsibility configured their tool to use the algorithmic pricing to automatically set the price instead of manually setting the prices, and deviating from that automatic price requires approval.
> who is typically the only party in the loop with the ability to settle the disagreement
This is not true as well. If the person does have pricing responsibility, they can just set the price to whatever. If they don't, it gets set to approvals for whoever does, which would probably be someone in that employee's management chain. And by management I mean the leasing company or management company or ownership. Not RealPage.
> Similarly, that store manager at Walmart you mentioned should have to seek approval from the same advisor that does prices for K-mart and Target
Once again, this isn't requiring approval from the RealPage Pricing Advsior. Nowhere does this article actually state the approval has to come from RealPage or that RealPage actually has the power to block price changes. This is requiring approval from whoever at the property actually has pricing responsibility, whoever that may be. Chances are it isn't the front of line leasing agent though.
It's right there in the text of the lawsuit:
>> ...If Lessors wish to diverge from the “approved pricing” they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval. RealPage encourages participating Lessors to have daily calls between the Lessors’ employees with pricing responsibility and the RealPage Pricing Advisor.
>> 52. If there is a disagreement between the participating Lessor and the RealPage Pricing Advisor, the dispute is often elevated to the Lessor’s management for resolution, and specific reasons justifying a departure from RealPage’s pricing level are usually required. But RealPage emphasizes the need for discipline among participating Lessors and urges them that for its coordinated algorithmic pricing to be the most successful in increasing rents, participating Lessors must adopt RealPage’s pricing at least 80% of the time
Now you can reasonably dispute whether the Lessor employee carrying out day to day responsibilities actually has pricing responsibility if they're unable to vary prices by themselves, but what is not normal is that the higher pricing authority which doesn't need an approval process appears to sit with employees of what is notionally a third party software vendor for a lot of notionally competing landlords
[nb I edited my previous post slightly whilst you were replying. Slight change of phrasing but I don't think it materially affects your reply]
I do dispute it, because it even suggests later that "the dispute is often elevated to the Lessor’s management for resolution". It implies some percentage of these disputes don't bother getting elevated, probably because that user actually did have pricing authority and could just change the price. Most users of the system would not have this permission. Just like most employees at the checkout counter can't change the price without approval.
Do I agree this market is a bit strange for having these algorithmically generated prices? Sure. Should it be investigated for potentially illegal business practices? Sure. Is requiring a manager approval for changing the price from what those with pricing authority originally set it to, even if that price is essentially "auto", strange? No.
Or it implies that when the Pricing Advisor won't change the model, they are persuaded to back down and accept the prices given, by a company that insists its valuation model will only work if clients adhere to its prices >80% of the time[1]. Or that sometimes the "Pricing Advisor", notionally a customer success employee of an ISV, has some sort of executive authority to adjust the price which that Lessor's own employee doesn't. Certainly those two outcomes are those the drafter of the lawsuit intended to imply, regardless of which is actually the most frequent.
It'd be odd if a company put the equivalent of a checkout operative on the call with a third party "Pricing Advisor" to discuss the price (both in general and in the context that RealPage supposedly encourages daily calls with employees "with pricing responsibility").
[1]I sold an algorithmic valuation model once. It's something of an understatement to say that this is not how valuation models ordinarily work or the sort of feedback a valuation professional would give to clients...
So yeah, investigate those calls. Investigate how the pricing algorithm comes up with its price. Investigate how much the marketing is pushing cartel-like behavior. Smash it with a hammer if they're breaking the law.
But the fact that requiring front of line employee pricing changes to be approved by someone in management at the property management/ownership as something wrong or needing investigation, that's pretty normal. Most users of RealPage wouldn't have pricing authority! They're front of house salespeople. Its these kinds of requests to change the prices that would come under review, and that approval wouldn't be at the decision by RealPage. Sure, maybe RealPage has a lot of persuasion over the person making that final decision, but ultimately whoever has pricing authority at that property (not a RealPage employee) isn't the one that clicks "Approve" either way.
Awaiting approval from your manager to change the price is not evidence of price fixing, which is what I originally replied to.
>> 51. Specifically, every morning, RealPage provides participating Lessors with recommended price levels. Lessors typically must communicate to a RealPage “Pricing Advisor” that they have “accept[ed]” or “confirm[ed] the “approved pricing” within a specified time frame. If Lessors wish to diverge from the “approved pricing” they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval. RealPage encourages participating Lessors to have daily calls between the Lessors’ employees with pricing responsibility and the RealPage Pricing Advisor.
>> 52. If there is a disagreement between the participating Lessor and the RealPage Pricing Advisor, the dispute is often elevated to the Lessor’s management for resolution, and specific reasons justifying a departure from RealPage’s pricing level are usually required. But RealPage emphasizes the need for discipline among participating Lessors and urges them that for its coordinated algorithmic pricing to be the most successful in increasing rents, participating Lessors must adopt RealPage’s pricing at least 80% of the time
There is nothing remotely normal about someone having the executive decision making authority to authorise a price variation a third party is trying to make to their inventory but not the executive authority to keep prices as they were. Nor is there anything remotely normal about a person seeking approval to retain or change price contacting a third party company's "Pricing Advisor" in the first instance rather than the approver within their own company. If the "Pricing Advisor" didn't have greater ability to resolve this "dispute" than the staff member who has the ability to "approve" a price change but apparently not to hold prices as they are, why would they be contacted?
Nobody has argued there isn't some ultimate beneficial owner of a property with the power to tell RealPage to bugger off, they're arguing that as described this resembles a normal chain of authority and consultation of third party experts in roughly the same way an MLM resembles a regular sales team. Now if you want to argue that this is deceptive wording on the part of the firm drafting the lawsuit stitching lots of discrete elements together into the appearance of a single process of questionable legality, I'll agree that may be possible (putting the worst possible spin on things is a class action lawyer's job) but then, some evidence of that would be nice...
Ownership/management chooses to buy RealPage for their property management solution for a building. They decide to configure it and contract out Pricing Advisor services. They've now established the default prices are whatever RealPage suggests it should be.
They then hire a lot of leasing agents (or they hire a leasing agency who hires these people). These are front of line sales people. These people are getting the day to day updates on changes to these prices, which are supposedly algorithmically generated. These are the people you'd want to review these prices, because these are the people who are actually dealing with the day to day of trying to sell these units. If these prices that the advisor is suggesting are unreasonable, they should probably push back and make a recommendation to change the price. They're the ones hearing customers argue the prices are overpriced and what not, they're a bit closer to the ground truth of the price in many ways.
However, those front line workers probably should not have arbitrary pricing powers. They're just focusing on signing leases, not necessarily broader picture of the building's business.
So talking about the approval process (which was the whole point I was originally replying to, not the algorithmic pricing or the whole weird relationship of RP to lessors which I've agreed should be investigated), lets just remove the whole algorithmic side of things. Upper management said units lease for $2/sqft. Front of line leasing agent decides to start signing leases for $1.75/sqft. Should that front of line leasing agent have been able to change the price from what upper management wanted without seeking an approval? Should they have probably given a written reason for going against the established pricing structure upper management chose?
So now lets enter back the idea of the algorithmic pricing. Upper management likes this dynamic algorithmic pricing. They say, whatever the algorithm sets, that's the price today. Algorithm says $2/sqft. Front of line leasing agent thinks a more realistic price is $1.75/sqft. Should that front of line leasing agent just be able to arbitrarily decide what the price is without seeking some approval? Ultimately, that review isn't some RP agent; that review is the same manager as before.
I think you're conflating the people with pricing authority on the call with the Pricing Advisor and the people who would often be submitting pricing changes for approvals. If they're having to get the pricing change approved by their management, then by definition they didn't have pricing authority. The people with pricing authority are the ones who made the decision to use this whole Pricing Advisor system, and are continuing to allow the Pricing Advisor use their black box to tell them what the price is today. The ones on that call are the ones that can tell RP to bugger off, as by definition they have pricing authority.
I do agree the algorithmic pricing is weird, and a lot of markets don't behave this way. I do think there's some bad relationships what with the pricing advisors and the large market presence of RP. These things should be investigated and potentially have judgements against. The fact its literally saying "coordinated algorithmic pricing" is a major red flag there's something bad happening here. The "coordinated" part is the part is the thing that's bad, not that front of line employees need approvals to change prices or even just the basic idea of using algorithms to set prices.
But the actual process as described involves an algorithm operated by a third party varying an organization's price, a representative of that company being required to communicate their acceptance or disagreement with reasons to the third party, the staff member with that executive responsibility being encouraged to speak to a representative of the third party, and escalate to unspecified management only in the case a "dispute" is not resolved by that third party.
That's not at all similar to how a regular approval process works with even the most junior staff members, and the idea it applies only to front of house staff is entirely your invention.
Every member of every unlawful cartel ever had senior decision makers who chose to sign up to the cartel and could tell it to bugger off or make the odd exception. That doesn't mean they can't be accused of price fixing in the event they take the decision to delegate day to day pricing to an organization also setting their competitors' prices, or even worse involve them in the approval chain for exceptions to those prices.
This is ultimately all I'm arguing. I'm entirely in agreement the relationship between RP and a significant chunk of the market, and the fact they're naming the pricing strategy as coordinated sounds exactly like price fixing.
But, requiring a manager to approve a change in pricing, that isn't odd. That singular thing, that's all I'm talking about, because that's what I originally replied to here.
> > await approval
> Sure seems like RealPage is price fixing then
Awaiting approval from your manager to change the price is not evidence of price fixing. Do you disagree with this basic premise?
By whom? It's rather ambiguous (as is so oftent he case with the passive voice), I can see how you and the other person drew different interpretations.
Second, this isn't playstation though is it? But staying with this example, if I go get a $50 meal my server very much can adjust my bill 'I removed X', 'I comped Y' happens all the time. If I go to a matress store/furniture store the sales person very much has the ability to lower my price arbitrarily on items way more expensive than a Playstation. Your 1 example isn't really all that relevant.
I dunno, I definitely have some posts where I have to wait for the reply link to show up to write a reply.
> if I go get a $50 meal my server very much can adjust my bill 'I removed X', 'I comped Y' happens all the time.
And usually behind the scenes they got a supervisor or manager approval for doing such a thing, or will probably have to explain the deviance from normal pricing later.
> If I go to a matress store/furniture store the sales person very much has the ability to lower my price arbitrarily on items way more expensive than a Playstation.
Most times that I've negotiated pricing for things (cars, mattresses, etc.) outside of private party the final price was subject to some kind of supervisor/manager approval. I can't think of a single time where the final sale for some negotiated price didn't have some approval process to it.
If a business just allows their front of line employees to arbitrarily set prices without any kind of review, their business probably isn't going to do too well. The front of line sales people probably don't have all the information as to why the company is wanting to set the prices a certain way, and without that information they're setting prices rather arbitrarily. This could lead to some pretty massive damages to the company.
If a waiter just decides to start only charging $1 for the $5 burgers, the business is going to have a problem.
J/K, I believe it has something to do with karma level. You still have a pretty low karma amount.
Uh, OPEC?
Saying OPEC doesn't fix prices is a nonsense statement that does nothing but split hairs. OPEC engages in price fixing as set forth by the FTC, though they are not subject to the FTC. [2]
Price fixing is a term of art that doesn't just mean the specific price of a sale is fixed. Price fixing can also mean that prices are indirectly fixed by production quotas or capacity. OPEC exists for the very reason to set production quotas or capacity. "OPEC's objective is to co-ordinate and unify petroleum policies among Member Countries" [3]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankoberlein/2017/01/11/earth...
[2] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
cartel [1]
noun
a group of similar independent companies who join together to control
prices and limit competition:
* an oil cartel
I suspect there’s a lot of other price coordination schemes going on under the surface of our society just like this. The pandemic gave them cover, but the coordinated effort to raise prices destroys the efficient market hypothesis as does the gargantuan nature (and influence) of single actors within industries.
There is no future for capitalism without harsh enforcement and trust-busting on this front.
> There is no future for capitalism
My honest opinion -- We don't need an efficient market. We don't need extreme capitalism. We need housing for everyone.
We need government to step in and cap housing prices, build more housing, and drive away the 80-year-old farts with 15 houses still trying to extract money from poor college students.
Housing should be built to LIVE in, not as an investment.
Taxing land value -- this unfortunately leads to them passing on the taxes to renters, and rental housing becomes ever more unaffordable
It incentivizes multi-unit construction, as the more productive the land is, the less onerous the land taxes become. (Wheres currently, developing land normally increases the land tax.)
Increasing units per land both provides more housing, and reduces the tax/renter pass through.
It disincentivizes holding unproductive land as an investment, since unproductive land gets taxed as highly as productive land.
All these benefits probably accrue, from good economic alignment, because a land tax, instead of total property value tax, reflects that it is land, not its development, which is the finite resource.
Land is finite, yet we all absolutely need land, along with food, air, and water. (Finite in a soft way, given different land is more or less usable). We only "own" land in passing. So those holding it shouldn't be lightly excluding better uses of an absolutely necessary resource.
Also, as other comments said, it incentivizes increased density.
No, this is not how this works. Rent is set by demand and (very insufficient) supply.
If landlord could increase rent by $X - they would have increased it already (software in TFA speeds up the process, but doesn't set market clearing price). A simple thought experiment would be something akin "98% tax on rental income". "Pass it to renter" would imply 50x increase in rent to preserve existing income.
Bottom line: make it easier to build more housing. it doesn't have to be subsidized/affordable/below market rate[0]. Any addition of units has downward effect on rent across all range of prices.
[0] > [In Helsinki] The supply of new market rate units triggers moving chains that quickly reach middle- and low-income neighborhoods and individuals. Thus, new market-rate construction loosens the housing market in middle- and low-income areas even in the short run.
From "City-wide effects of new housing supply: Evidence from moving chains" https://ideas.repec.org/p/fer/wpaper/146.html
This software can affect the market price beyond just accelerating the speed at which it reaches equilibrium. The software can help create an inefficient market where suppliers of housing are no longer competing against each other and instead all, together, take a 5-20% hit on "volume" for a larger increase in price that more than offsets the rate of empty units.
Similar to OPEC when OPEC was overwhelmingly dominant (before shale oil/shale gas explosion in USA/Russia).
In a competitive market without this software, each individual player would try harder to reach 0% vacancy because each marginal unit sold would be nearly pure profit, and this could drive prices lower than leaving any units empty.
Right, if one can get majority of the landlords to collude and government doesn't crack on collusion - this software would create such market.
Until we're in such dire situation: software is expediting price discovery, discovered prices are high because we don't build enough, we don't build enough because there's ridiculous amount of red tape, and doing anything that doesn't lead to more housing being built is spending time and effort on wrong problem.
How about we just build a lot more housing and let the chips fall where they may. Shouldn't even need to tax empty housing, either, if we build enough then the market can fix the rest pretty easily.
The whole reason we have a housing problem to begin with isn't capitalism, it's government restrictions on building. Urban grown boundaries, zoning, you name it.
Look, if you want more housing we have to let developers build more housing. Many areas in the country put in restrictions like limiting the height of new buildings because it's 'nice' not to have the views of the sky by blocked by a new building.
Well nice costs something, and in this case it's housing scarcity.
Not if you have the government build housing.
We need something like Singapore's Housing Development Board (HDB) which keeps reusing the same architectural designs and elements for simple, functional, repeatable housing that just works.
Singapore also has private-built condos, for those who want luxury, but the HDB flats are perfectly functional, dignified, clean, and comfortable. About 80% of Singaporeans live in government-built housing. Homelessness is almost nonexistent.
First of all, no one is going to benefit if 25% of US population moves to NYC.
Second, if we build millions of houses and they stay vacant, we just wasted a ton of money.
Third, if we just give away all those houses for free, we're going to destroy the real estate market, which will have a cascading effect and cause a huge crisis in all sectors (and if you think that only billionaires will be affected, think harder).
Fourth, due to misaligned incentives, governments are known to be way less efficient than private companies.
So our best option is to be smart: build only so many houses to meet the demand and so that the utility they provide is roughly equal to their cost, and let private companies build those houses. Now we only need two things: a tool to measure the utility of something, and some incentives for private companies.
I guess we all know where this is going.
There's no need for coercion. The landlords themselves are greedy (I don't think any more so than any other investor class).
Landlords being greedy isn't really a problem. They're going to try to get the highest rent. That's capitalism.
It's supposed to work in a COMPETITIVE market.
RealPage fixing prices breaks that. It's clearly causing consumer harm and anti-competitive.
>efficient market
That's already been destroyed by 50 years of city-enforced redlining and NIMBYism.
(in Coach Z voice) "That happened one time!"
TransAmerica owns an insurance MLM called World Financial Group. I was unfortunate enough to be approached by one of their salespeople at a meetup, and the number on the business card he gave me was, I shit you not, 1-800-PYRAMID. A reference to the TransAmerica Pyramid Building in San Francisco, but still.
Is it possible for the suit to result in charges brought against all users of RealPage? They are active participants, after all.
I think it's more accurate to say it boils down to "our sole underlying principle is our own advantage, and the privilege of not even having our advantages challenged or negotiated."
But otherwise, I quite agree.
These aren't sports teams, you don't just get together with your buds and see how it plays out over a couple drinks. "Aw dang I really thought we had it but you brought back child labor right at the buzzer there, rough one today."
No, wealthy people are for price collusion because it gives them more power, and they are against unions because they take away some of that power. Some things actually are that simple.
Internet commenters love to group opinions into a camp and then call them hypocritical. (Ex: capitalists love rent market manipulation but hate unions, those hypocrites!)
Of course, that’s not true, most capitalists would not want price fixing - something generally done under centralized planned economies.
Over time I've come to realize that not all people are the same, that there's a distribution of how agreeable / disagreeable people as well as how assertive. And it turns out on parts of that distribution there are people who enjoy not finding situations that benefit them but winning benefit and status from others.
I don't know whether that's "most" people. I'd guess not and that the distribution gets thinner the farther from the average disagreeableness and assertiveness you go. But it's enough people that I no longer discard adversarial values as a potential motive.
It is an emergent property of capitalist systems that people who love market manipulation will outcompete those who don't and thus end up in positions of such power that they effectively determine the characteristics and behavior of the system.
There are lots of people playing the capitalism game who don't want to cheat. But the system rewards cheaters who then use their power to produce the world we are all forced to live in.
That's the thing about crime: it's pretty much everywhere people are. Churches have cooperated with it. But that association doesn't define what churches are, it doesn't define what law enforcement is, it doesn't define any of the other businesses. In any walk of life, in any kind of organization, there can be people who will organize force and influence for private benefit rather than cooperating for the ideals an institution was created for.
Unions are subject to that too? Well no kidding.
Also "dystopian, Hollywood writeresque prose" -- WTF? The comment you're replying to contains a credible model of how market systems become non-competitive. It's useful whether you like market systems or not (if you like them, you can use it to inform improvements). And what's comes out of creative media production is such a wide variety of content that the only thing that's certain is that you can't keep it all under one umbrella, much less one as tattered as the one you just unfolded. But even if we could imagine some representative-middle it sure wouldn't have a lot of dialogue in it resembling the comment you're responding to. The whole thing just smacks of name-calling driven by unreflective associations.
I would strongly challenge this. Capitalism is generally oriented around maximizing profit. Any time you can sell a good for more than its cost of production, you make a profit. Competitors, when not prevented by things like IP laws, can undercut prices within that gap and take your market share, provided they have a similar cost of production. The "profit gap" can be exploited.
Price fixing "fixes" that bug, and is a net positive over the alternative of racing to the bottom. Better yet, you can use price fixing to arbitrarily increase that gap, which is exactly what TFA is about.
This is an incredibly weak and misguided argument. You're saying "Capitalists don't like X when it harms them, therefore they never like X".
Yeah, but they like X when it benefits them...
You can't extrapolate from a single data point to make a generalization about a whole. Especially when there are enormous differences.
Basically we create markets that enable (sometimes force) transactions in which one side has high amounts of leverage, and allow that leverage to increase over time. We don't view this high leverage as a problem. And, instead of fixing the issue of ever-increasing leverage, we instead exhort people to get to a position where they can be exerting it.
It's no wonder many feel like the game is rigged against them.
Unfortunate phrasing? If the system is really rigged, then you don't just feel it is rigged. You discover, understand, realize - know it is rigged against you?
The capitalist class is likely to be the owner both of the corporation you work for, and of the housing you live in, so you have the same power struggle with the same people.
People owning their own homes, and small landlords push back against that, but the trend is that the owning class owns everything
Capitalism would be someone coming in and realizing the prices are inflated and undercut the rent prices while still being profitable.
Problems in real-estate are almost always government created IMHO and not "capitalism".
The government enforces capitalism laws (rather than socialist or chartalist) so how do you distinguish?
They can't really though, at least not anytime soon -- the cycle itself gives the cartel more capital. If they buy units as they come onto the market, they hold the equity in those units, which they can instantly mortgage out to get more capital, which they can spend on more units, which they can instantly mortgage out to get more capital. This is especially true when interest rates are low, (the lower rates are, the cheaper this cycle is to continue -- at interest rates below the real inflation rate, they effectively get given free money to do this)
And yes, it exposes them to the risk that eventually this bubble could pop, but it could take many years (decades even?) before that happens.
It requires power to prevent voluntary transactions and that comes in lots of flavors.
My point is you are distinguishing between government and capitalism - capitalism is an attribute of the government and power structure. The people with capital are the ones preventing the transactions (to their own benefit of course).
I don't think that is a common formulation of the idea of "capitalism".
If competition is unrestricted, cartels are unstable structures. It only takes one member unwilling to join cartel to ruin them. That's why drug cartels are killing each other and smaller competitors.
There are exceptions, but that's where antitrust laws come in.
It only takes one member in an enviroment protected from all other actions of the cartel to ruin them.
If all economic actors only interacted in the marketplace itself, then, yes, cartels are unstable. But businesses are not spherical cows in a vacuum.
In practice, cartels can exert all sorts of forces to insulate themselves. While most don't go to the extreme of drug cartels which you should note are quite adept at maintaining their stability, they can still to plenty without resorting to violence. Off the top of my head:
* Economies of scale, barriers of entry, and other Econ 101 stuff that privilege large entrenched actors over upstarts.
* Threatening to stop giving contracts to builders if they work with the competitor.
* Threat of social sanctions since many of the people who run these businesses all know each other and play together. Pretty awkward to break up a cartel at 10am and then go to your regularly scheduled golf game with its owners at 4pm.
* Buying smaller competitors outright before they defect.
All of those already exist without cartels.
> Threatening to stop giving contracts to builders if they work with the competitor
This assumes that pool of builders is somehow limited, but if that's the case, builders have leverage. How exactly do you see this conversation going?
- If you work for our competitor, we won't give you any contracts!
- But he can just hire other builders.
- He can't, you're the only builders in the area.
- Oh. Well then, how about we go work for both you and your competitor, and you have to pay us more. What are you going to do, we're the only builders in the area.
> Threat of social sanctions since many of the people who run these businesses all know each other and play together
There's potentially billions of dollars to chase, but what's stopping you is that this will piss of your golf buddies. Right.
> Buying smaller competitors outright before they defect
You can't just assume you can buy any company. Why don't drug cartels just "buy" each other? Surely it's preferable to non-stop murdering.
Well, sure, but in an environment with a cartel, they will privilege the cartel over other actors in the system.
> This assumes that pool of builders is somehow limited
And it is. It's limited to the builders who operate within the geographic area the cartel operates in.
In general, you're just dismissing these very practical criticisms with more "idealized market theory" that only works when it doesn't have to take real frictions into account, or by just saying what boils down to "nuh-uh".
[1] https://livebaltimore.com/neighborhoods/madison-eastend/
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2011-E-Lafayette-Ave-Balt...
I see some 'houses' in the area that you're looking at for $130k, built in WWII and likely have heating bills high enough to bankrupt the wealthy unless the place is ripped apart and modern insulation is put in.
Large back tax bill, lack of city services (e.g. if live in Springwells, good luck getting a reasonable response time from Detroit PD if you're being burgled) and an unsafe transit situation are the most common ones I can think of.
The houses are cheap for a reason. Its not as though Detroit is filled with provincial oafs that don't know what they're selling.
But who buys the government?
That number has climbed faster than inflation for some time and is the largest driver of increased multifamily development costs.
Want cheaper housing? Make it easier to build housing.
"""One night, on my way home from work, I pushed the wrong elevator button and got out on the floor below mine without realizing it. My key wouldn’t fit the lock to what I had assumed was my door, so I turned the knob and stepped, to my astonishment, into a completely empty, totally untouched one-bedroom. I turned around and beelined to the elevator, worried that I’d get busted for trespassing, when I noticed strips of masking tape covering the door frames on all of the other (presumably empty) apartments on the floor.
This was how I became aware of “warehousing,” the practice by which landlords keep unrented apartments off the market to create artificial scarcity. Building owners have always done this, especially in new constructions with lots of virgin inventory, because why give renters the upper hand if they don’t have to?
But they really started doing it during the pandemic. On a 2022 episode of the real-estate-industry podcast Talking Manhattan, Gary Malin, COO of the Corcoran Group, made a surprising claim: “At one point during the downturn, the vacancy rate in the city was close to 25 percent,” he said. “You had owners who were sitting on hundreds if not thousands of empty apartments.”"""
If there are extremely wealthy entities that can afford to soak up enough supply to meaningfully impact market prices, making it easier to build new housing is likely part of the equation, but it may not be the silver bullet. I don't know how many units are held unoccupied, but as someone from Detroit, I'd advise against letting supply get too far ahead of demand (Context: a major housing surplus developed in Detroit as the population dropped from ~2M in 1960 to ~0.6M today, and this surplus destroyed the value of homeowner's equity and lead to abandonment, blight, and massive arson rates).
Now that demand has returned, and vacancy rates have plunged to their normal sub-5% level, rents in the city have hurtled back to their 2020 prices or even higher. [2]
This is exactly what economics would predict of a market system with constrained supply. Demand is almost never as elastic as we recently experienced, and this only serves as further evidence of nonexistent undersupply being the primary cause of high prices. Not "warehousing" or hoarding of vacant housing that already exists somewhere.
[1] https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/new-york-ny
[2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/023-22/hpd-releases-initia...
"""Look, it’s possible that my suspicions are baseless and all of these buildings are full. Maybe their tenants really did come flooding back to New York last year. Maybe some are former couples who broke up during the pandemic and needed twice as many apartments and others are remote workers from Milwaukee or Akron evading city taxes by claiming residency in their old states. Maybe they came without any furniture so they didn’t have to hire movers. Maybe they’re homeschooling their kids, taking Ubers instead of the subway, avoiding restaurants, and abstaining from all other activities that would expose them to public data collectors. Weirder things have happened here. But if you meet any of these people, give them a change-of-address form for me. They’re probably missing some good mail."""
One of the central points of the main article (exemplified by the opening sentences quoted below) is that demand hasn't returned.
"""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!"""
What we have is a complete lack of top-down management to allocate it efficiently.
If we combined Soviet economics and modern Big Data, we could solve this easily-- mandate that economic engines are sited where housing gluts exist, and assign out housing to optimize things like average commute length.
I think I spotted the challenge.
Prices are set on the margin, you need a few landlords to start to feel capital pressure to drop rents.
Yeah, I can't imagine there would be any unintended consequences to that.
In what world does raising the cost of providing housing cause landlords to reduce rents? More likely it causes landlords to stop renting. See the consequences of the rent control regulations in NYC, for example.
Low availability keeps prices high with no need to worry about things like quality. There is therefore no incentive to build to increase supply. When a market is this dysfunctional, state intervention is the only way forward. Build publicly owned housing and rent it affordably.
This probably won’t happen either, because so many in government are also landlords.
Edit: Wow, so many downvotes for advocating public housing.
So far, they've use the latter option, and that's most likely because the first one is hard: if the cartel controls the market and keeps the prices high, new investors have no incentive to join, they'll make more money if they don't.
Power tends to accumulate when government actions restrict voluntary trade that would have otherwise proceeded. That is a characteristic of governments not of "capitalism", IMHO.
Cartels certainly aren't free markets. To keep those you need policy which keeps them that way.
The problem with using 'capitalism' in discussions like this is that there isn't a precise definition of it. To some people it simply means private ownership of the means of production, to others in includes free trade, to others (and to my thinking, the most precise, but YMMV) its about the separation of management and ownership and tradable claims on the firm.
If this effect isn't intuitive to you, consider what happens when the market for something is completely removed from government involvement, like the global market for cocaine. Or a market that develops in the absence of any kind of centralized authority, like Somalia.
That's what happens to every market unless a state intervenes. The invisible hand of the market trends towards long term warlord/mafia type arrangements unless the public is organized enough to stop it.
The global market for cocaine is highly regulated by very violent men with guns.
It is for that reason that drug consumers favor legalization but drug suppliers oppose it.
The interesting part is who those men with guns are accountable to.
And your No True Scotsman example is typically heard in reference to communism in USSR/China.
I'll choose my billionaires over famine any day.
Cartels are very much capitalist, because they create more profits for everyone involved. The more parties you get involved, the better it is for all of them, and the worse is it for any competitors who do not join.
They definitely are! Price fixing ensures higher rent for the whole cartel (which is comprised of their customers). And enforcing cooperation is decidedly a good thing, because cooperation is required to keep prices artificially inflated.
What Realpage gains from creating a cartel is a really sticky customer base. I don't think it makes sense as a model because it seems to be clearly illegal, but putting that aside they're delivering a lot of value to their customers and are getting paid for it - it's definitely a sensible business model.
Price fixing ensures higher profits for the entire market, not just the cartels. Those outside the cartel equally benefit from the price fixing as cartel members, but that no pressure to constrain supply, which puts them in a strictly better position. For example, OPEC enabled the fracking industry and when OPEC loosened their price fixing, in 2019, many of these companies went bankrupt.
> What Realpage gains from creating a cartel is a really sticky customer base.
So that's why they allegedly threaten to fire their customers when they don't follow their pricing recommendation? It would make much more sense to simply offer the best pricing product.
That's my point. If RealPage were creating a cartel, they would be creating themselves problems without any upside. They aren't receiving the rent. They're receiving money from landlords who are happy with their pricing model. The fact the RealPage does not seem to experience the same problems common to cartels suggests that they aren't facilitating a cartel.
> The reason why I'm skeptical is because "cartel as a service" doesn't make any sense as a business model.
It absolutely does. The challenge with a cartel is communication and coordination: ensuring the members know what prices they are supposed to set, and pressuring them all to follow along. Realpage provides exactly that.
If there's any integrity left in our legal system, this will be a slam dunk for renters.
> As one Lessor explains, while “we are all technically competitors,” RealPage “helps us work together,” “to work with a community in pricing strategies, not to work separately.”
[1] https://www.hausfeld.com/media/550bhzyp/realpage-complaint-f...
But having someone approve pricing? That is clearly something worth prosecuting and heavily fining for.
RealPage basically just put themselves in the position of running the market.
It's hard to imagine a clearer, more blatant description of cartel price fixing.
This is like calling your pyramid scheme "Pyramidal Inc.".