Okay but Realpage has a decade of real pricing data that it can use to continue informing these rental companies and outside of them having extremely hard boundaries in their service this is just going to happen again.

This doesn’t do a whole lot to address the actual issue, and these companies aren’t going to stop colluding over a wrist slap like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion

Basically when somebody makes a pricing error on a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange there's a mob of automated arbitrage bots that try to trade against it. Who wins and actually gets to make the trade is mainly determined by how high of a transaction fee your bot is willing to pay.

You can win instantly by offering to trade with a transaction fee so high it almost wipes out all but a cent or two of the entire arbitrage profits, because nobody else will pay a higher fee.

Instead what happens is bots offer the lowest possible fee, then immediately increase their fee as soon as they see a competing bot try to take the trade with a higher fee. This results in the bot offering the highest fee changing every several milliseconds as the fee quickly grows.

The way Ethereum mining works, this results in the winning bot being randomly selected from among the set of bots "bidding" up the transaction fee: blocks are mined at random intervals of iirc about 20 seconds, and whoever had the highest bid at the time the next block is mined wins. <20 seconds of bidding is short enough that even with the bidding, the transaction fee doesn't get bid up particularly high, and the winner makes out with a highly profitable arbitrage trade.

By giving up a guaranteed win and instead rolling the dice against other bots, transaction fees stay low and everyone has a higher expected profit. It's coordination that happens without any communication between the participants and quite possibly the participants didn't realize they were in effect cooperating when they added the high speed bidding behavior to their bots.

This is like 1980s sawtooth algos in real finance.

A lot of crypto is former HF folks taking old strategies to a dumber field.

For example, imagine a car auction that lasts only 20 seconds, with a random delay of up to 1 second, and with a very small minimum bid increment, say 2 cents, and no bidding fee or limit on number of bids. Now image 5 different people each outbidding each other by the minimum bid increment every 10 milliseconds. The price will climb by about $2/second, so by the end of auction, the winner will get the car for $40. Because everyone's bidding so fast, and nobody knows exactly when the auction will end, the winner is effectively random. At least on an expected value basis, this is highly beneficial to the participants vs actually bidding up to the true price of the car until other participants are not willing to bid anymore.

I think a comparable situation would be if everyone bid up to or higher than the actual price to generally support it.

They would be acting economically irrational in that situation to increase price overall, like corporate land lords refusing to lower prices even if it means they have higher than normal vacancy rates.

Naively, if I knew everyone’s salaries were about to double, I’d hope to be holding a fair amount of real estate going into that doubling.

But mainly it is that you would need to remove or decrease benefits for those who do not work in order to have room for higher salaries. That is not a problem for the unemployed because higher salaries means that the only people without work are those who do not want to work. But it is a big problem for those who do not want to work and for example would like to live off their real estate.

The gut reaction to higher salaries is that people would have more money to purchase real estate or pay rent, but I think the downwards effects for real estate are much stronger. And the evidence is that in every country which has seen a period of high salaries for workers, real estate has been cheap during that period for workers to buy.

Real question. Do we have evidence of this from anything except developing economies pulling countries out of poverty? Like a first world country sort of thing. Because to me it seems like higher salaries comes first, and the property would lag for a bit while the market reaches its new level. Does that make sense?

High salaries and cheap housing was the reality in I think every first world country when they developed after WWII.

But since the wealth gap keeps widening, fewer and fewer workers can afford this, as they get priced out of locations that offer good employment. At the same time the rich keep investing their money into higher-margin industries. Consider that for landlords owning enough housing, building more can have a negative RoI, and they all know that they all know this!

If you don't believe me, think about just how quickly the datacenter boom became reality. All that money was waiting around, and evidently could have been turned into a lot of building activity in a short amount of time.

The only answer is to build more housing and have a high property tax in unoccupied housing.

You could build as much more housing as you want, but if those houses only become accessible to purchase for those who already own real estate instead of for those who work, then nothing will change.

It is true that "housing in trollbridge's front yard" is not constrained. If you need a place to live and show up here with a camper, or plans to get one, I can probably set you up for a while. It is not a lifestyle most people are interested in.

I don’t think this is really true. It’s naively true if you just look at the number of homeless people vs the number of empty units, but misses:

1. That markets need some portion of empty units for fluidity.

2. That many people aren’t homeless, but living in situations where they would take more housing if it was available. (Living with roommates, ex-partners, family, etc.)

3. Many places simply don’t have enough housing for everyone who wants to live there. If they did, people would move from other places.

Of course, that also shows the problem: it haircuts pensions as well, since they are a large part of the rent seeking class.

If inflation is too low or doesn’t exist, then there’s less incentive to do anything with your money. If I have bunch a money that I don’t need to spend immediately, and I just want to keep it secure, why would I not keep it in a safe or non-investment account if it’s not losing value over time? What’s my incentive to risk it by lending it out to someone else?

Debt has something of a bad reputation and obviously it can be overused and abused, but it’s also something that helps the efficiency of economies. It maximizes the amount of money actively participating in the economy rather than sitting.

That's not true and repeating it doesn't make it so. Even in deflationary environment, the risk of missed purchases isn't zero and the risk of missing investment profits isn't zero either. From motivational point of view, inflation and deflation aren't different, they're the same thing in a mirror image.

There's a lot more to say about this, but the truth is deflation is naturally limited and much less problematic than inflation. Deflation is rare as hen's teeth and extremely easy to fix.

On the other hand, inflation has ruined numerous economies and has caused wars and large scale destruction. It tends to go out of hand and it's very hard to control, some of that is due to its insurmountable conflicts of interest. At scale, inflation is the most corrupt economic phenomenon by far.

The risk of missed purchases isn't zero and the risk of missing investment profits isn't zero either. From motivational point of view, inflation and deflation aren't different, they're the same thing in a mirror image.

Deflation is rare as hen's teeth, harmless and extremely easy to fix. Inflation, on the other hand, is the most corrupt economic phenomenon by far, it's hard to fix and it has ruined numerous economies, caused wars, destruction and famines.

> Debt has something of a bad reputation and obviously it can be overused and abused, but it’s also something that helps the efficiency of economies.

This is a strawman, nobody said debt as such was bad. However, since you started, let me correct you - as it is, debt not only "can be overused and abused" - it is routinely abused and overused and inflation is a huge part of it.

Could you explain? If you work. You're not renting. You're not on a pension. You're not ... then what is bad about inflation?

Work or no work doesn't matter, inflation steals everyone's savings, wages grow slower than inflation - so they get stolen too, it causes a run on assets, feeds on itself and feeds corruption-driven bubbles, the funds extracted via inflation lead to monopolization and oligarchy-zation, inflation can be used to install Hitlers and manipulate elections, the list goes on.

> You're not renting. You're not on a pension. You're not...

Right, if you're not living, inflation doesn't matter, in all other cases it does. I don't know what you are talking about here here, or rather, I know that you don't know what you're talking about.

It's crystal clear that you have no idea what the role of banks in the economy is and what it's supposed to be. Without that understanding you're going to keep presenting pompously mysterious arguments which are nonsensical even by the low-bar measure of mainstream economics. I cannot type a whole econ 101 course here, you're supposed to figure out on your own why we have banks, how they work and what they're supposed to achieve.

Luckily working people's savings are essentially nothing and you have a wage. Which means it won't affect poor working people. But yes it will destroy savings, which is why it hurts rich people and doesn't hurt poor people: they have savings you and I don't have.

Wages grow slower than inflation - that's the point, the government would shortcut this by overpaying, so that wages would grow at the pace or even faster than inflation.

> to keep presenting pompously mysterious arguments which are nonsensical even by the low-bar measure of mainstream economics ...

Still have my original (1970) economics textbook. This is what it says should be done. Explicitly raising inflation to 10% or so helps poor people by destroying their debt, and it hurts every kind of savings in the economy, which is why rich people don't want it. It equalizes everyone.

Lucky them, due to inflation constantly eroding their incomes, they can't save. I repeat, wage growth trails inflation, see housing and everything else.

> Which means it won't affect poor working people.

Untrue, as I've explained twice already.

> But yes it will destroy savings, which is why it hurts rich people and doesn't hurt poor people: the rich have savings you and I don't have. The rich have savings the state does not have.

Untrue, rich people don't gave savings, they have properties and investments, inflation is how they acquire more of them, the poor are forced to sell cheap to survive, the rich swallow it all.

> Explicitly raising inflation to 10% or so helps poor people by destroying their debt,

More falsehoods from you - poor people borrow small amounts all the time, think payday loans at rates rising with inflation and several times higher than the rates for the rich - inflation does help the rich who borrow large sums at long intervals but it doesn't help the poor at at all, for them, it's more inflation -> more wage erosion -> more (and more expensive) debt. You can't outrun your shadow, do you understand?

> and it hurts every kind of savings in the economy

It doesn't hurt the assets of the rich because they appreciate faster than inflation, especially if you include their siphoning of more assets due to the financially depressed poor.

> which is why rich people don't want it. It equalizes everyone.

The falsehoods are getting out of hand. The rich have vastly more debt than the poor, they borrow against their appreciating assets at vastly better interest rates and longer terms so the more inflation - the less they repay, so they love inflation more than anything - inflation makes the asset-holding rich richer. If you're incapable of understanding my words, hear an authority with experience - by Trump's words: "Inflation made me very rich"

> Still have my original (1970) economics textbook.

Shoddy econ books are dime a dozen. Give me the author and title, I love to make fun of sloppy econ books, there are so many of them, so much fun.

> Besides I don't understand why you're even making this argument... You can't stop it

Finally a sensible argument, kinda, as much as inevitability can be an argument. However, I'm not trying to stop inflation, I'm analyzing its systemic origins with an eye on systemic fixes. If it can't be stopped this time around, we should not allow it to happen again. Besides, I want to explore all options.

Seriously? I mean first of all you must see that on a large timeframe this claim is beyond bullshit. Economists claim that essentially from the beginning of time until 1972, and for a lot of people more like 1990, wages grew faster than inflation.

Second you must understand this can be shortcut. If the government explicitly hires and raises wages, obviously it determines 100% by itself if wages trail inflation or not.

> Untrue, rich people don't have savings, they have properties and investments

No they don't. Look at some properties and check if this is true. Rich people only really directly own private houses and only a few. And the superrich ... maybe a dozen. But that's it. All properties are financial constructions because of the massive liquidity advantages that has: Let's say you're rich, and you need money. If you own a shopping mall, you're screwed. But if the shopping mall is constructed using debt and you get 8% interest on that debt. First, it can be divided amongst ... anyone you like really. Second you can sell 1%, 10%, ... whatever you want to raise money. Or you can have them buy out the debt. Or ... The ability to raise money, to control where money goes is what really makes someone rich, it's what high middle class "climbers" don't have. Most properties work like companies do, except much more debt much less equity. One superrich who (has to) be pretty public with what he owns and how it's structured is the king of England. And while due to his special tax situation it is not 100% typical, it's still very instructive. So look at how it works. He owns companies (just because it's called "duchy of ..." or something like that doesn't mean it's not a company), and they own massive debt in properties that others manage for him.

> More falsehoods from you - poor people, poor on collateral, borrow small amounts all the time ...

There are TWO sides to debt. The person who borrows, and the person who lends money and gets the interest. If you have large inflation, on BOTH sides the numbers "go down" (compared to wages, because wages go up, loan amount don't)

The rest is making the same mistake as you keep making here. High inflation provides a (partial) reset. Existing loans become much easier to pay for, and worth much less. Poor people pay. Rich people receive the interest. Both become less compared to wages. Obviously this helps the poor and fucks over the rich.

Strawman. Nobody claimed there's only one. My explanations considered both sides while you use banalities as distractions.

> The rest is making the same mistake as you keep making here. High inflation provides a (partial) reset.

I'm not making any mistakes, I explained why the poor gain nothing from inflation - because of their high interest rates and frequent borrowing at interest rates rising with inflation. On the other hand, the rich having plenty of collateral, borrow a lot more, locking on low interest rates for long term loans which leads to them gaining significantly from the erosion of the interest they pay. Moreover, the rich have pricing power too, they increase the price of their assets output, including rent, while they suppress wages with their wage-setting power - they control the game.

So if they gain from this purely financial, zero sum scheme, somebody's got to lose and there's nobody else in it besides the the wage earning poor and middle class.

You mistake is to think that you can cure the effects of high cost of living with inflation. But the high cost of living is due to inflation... so you are trying to convince me that we can cure inflation with more inflation. In other words you're a like firefighter who puts out gasoline fires with more gasoline. Nice try.

Apparently you grok neither economics nor logic, so you have to rely on insiders to tell you truth every now and then. I quoted Trump, you skipped that. Here's another rich man who admits everything that I said, applicable to himself and others like him. Don't skip this, look at the video and the comments.

Chamath: I was wrong. The economy is broken:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PD-FlgD_ILw

And by best friends I don't mean "run in the same circles" but "go on vacation together with their kids", "are in each other's wedding parties", "are godparents to each other's children".

And then they have the audacity to act surprised when the public is pissed that, despite traffic studies showing that there's no road capacity and no room for adding lanes to arterials, despite environmental impact studies about the shoreline showing negative effects, that the commissions sign off on their buddies and their developments without even a hint of hesitation.

There’s basically no political will anywhere to make it easier to build.

They lost them?! Did the landlords pick their apartments up and move them to a new city? Or can they actually afford to hold out just to make a point?

If the sold them off as condos that's a good thing, we want more owners and less landlords.

More wealth in the hands of workers let's them fund their own housing needs and less wealth in the hands of landlords prevents them from obstructing housing development.

Yes. That’s a problem.

Landlords have an inherent trade off between holding out for a tenant who would pay a higher rent and not having the unit vacant in the meantime. Holding out for longer than that helps the other landlords at your expense. Meanwhile there are a large number of landlords, there is no way for the ones using a given system to force the others to do the same, and a significant percentage of them don't.

So if the system tells the landlords using it to do the thing that would increase rents if every landlord was using it, the "defectors" who don't use the system win out over anyone using it, which means using the system rather than defecting would cause you to lose money and everyone would have the incentive to defect.

Whereas if all the system is doing is suggesting the optimal point in the trade off between holding out for a higher paying tenant and renting the unit sooner, without assuming the other landlords are being required to use the same system, that's the same thing an individual landlord would do if they're not colluding.

The actual way landlords collude is through zoning boards, because then they have an enforcement mechanism, i.e. if someone is trying to defect by adding new units to alleviate the limited supply then the other landlords can sic the government on them having passed the various laws against doing that.

This is precisely what happened. Quoting from my comment at the time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39579488) --

Subscribing to a pricing data service: legal.

Using data feed to guide pricing and set initial figures: legal.

Agreeing, either implicitly or explicitly, to let the pricing data feed set the price floor: collusion.

Leaving units unsold and refusing to lower the price despite insufficient demand: usually a bad business decision, possibly indicator of a market failure.

Leaving units unsold to maintain agreed-upon price floor despite insufficient demand: collusion, market manipulation. Congratulations, you are a cartel.

Almost always.

The trick is figuring out where the failure is coming from, and whether your society can find a lever to pull to fix it.

You're assuming they were the first kind of fools rather than the second kind.

> Leaving units unsold to maintain agreed-upon price floor despite insufficient demand: collusion, market manipulation. Congratulations, you are a cartel.

Which is the thing that doesn't work when many other landlords aren't in on it, because then they get to fill their vacancies while you're stuck with the empty units.

Notice also that antitrust prohibits attempts to monopolize. Fools are quite capable of doing something which is still a violation of antitrust laws despite being ineffective and unprofitable.

In general the homeowners are more numerous but the landlords are somewhat more organized.

The homeowners are also being taken for a ride, because less restrictive zoning reduces the value of units (since you can increase the supply of them) while increasing the value of each piece of land (since you can now build more units on it). And the homeowners (and small landlords) are typically the ones with a high ratio of land to units, but they get hornswoggled into demanding the thing that really benefits the corporate landlords who own the existing high density buildings.

Suppose housing units in some area are going for $600k but are currently limited to one unit per plot. That changes, now you can build up to 20 units per plot. A developer can build units for $100k/unit (their cost, not what they would charge you) plus whatever the property cost to begin with. In other words, they could pay you that $600k, spend another $1M constructing 10 new units there, and then sell them for $600k each, i.e. $6M from investing $1.6M. $12M on 2.6M if they build 20 units. What happens then?

They're going to start doing that whenever a house comes on the market, so over time the cost of a unit comes down, e.g. to $400k. But that's the price for the new units which are only consuming 5-10% as much land. Developers are selling those, not buying them. They want the land that doesn't already have a lot of units on it, i.e yours. And even at $400k, building 10 units gets them $4M from $1M + whatever they pay you. Which means whenever a unit like yours comes on the market, every developer is going to want it.

Even at the lower price per unit, and even if they had to pay you $1M for the land instead of the original $600k, the developers would still be making a tidy profit. And since they have to outbid each other when your house comes on the market, how much are they going to bid when not being the high bidder means not making anything?

If the only market forces are landlords keeping half of their units empty so they can keep $1400 units priced at $2400 because that’s what the software (and indeed service) are pushing them to do, that’s price fixing.

There’s extra steps, it’s a new form, but the price is fixed, and the point of allowing housing to be built isn’t being fulfilled.

Not everything is "Economics 101."

No, the IRS doesn't allow tax deductions for the "missing rents" of unrented units. IRS only allows deducting ongoing expenses such as "maintenance, insurance, taxes, and interest," :

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p527.pdf

The IRS does allow tax deductions for "uncollected rents" but that's only for "bad debt" type of scenarios of signed lease contracts which creates an obligation to pay. Unrented units don't count in that scenario because there are no legally binding leases.

Voting at a polling place might, but I’m just the messenger, just telling you what’s out there.

I’m speculating the price would be closer to $1,400 per unit.

The price across this hypothetical town is $2,400 per unit (let’s say it’s a 2 bed 2 bath apartment), “suggested”/set by RealPage software.

Because that’s how using their product worked.

Half of them sit empty because their business model doesn’t care (tax deductions on other income, while still increasing total assets in their portfolio).

There is…a good amount of evidence of landlords doing this, and how:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-r...

and

these landlords coordinated through a variety of means, including:

Directly communicating with competitors’ senior managers about rents, occupancy, and other competitively sensitive topics. In one example, Greystar supplied Camden with information not only about very recent renewal rates, but also its approach to pricing for the upcoming quarter, its acceptance of RealPage’s pricing recommendations, use of concessions and competitively sensitive information about occupancy. Likewise, executives at Camden and LivCor communicated over the course of months about their pricing strategies, including plans for certain price increases. Regularly conducting “call arounds.” During these discussions, euphemistically referred to as “market surveys,” property managers called or emailed competitors to share, and sometimes discuss, competitively sensitive information about rents, occupancy, pricing strategies and discounts. Participating in “user groups” hosted by RealPage. For instance, landlords discussed via user groups how to modify the software’s pricing methodology, as well as their own pricing strategies. In one example, LivCor and Willow Bridge executives participated in a user group discussion of plans for renewal increases, concessions and acceptance rates of RealPage rent recommendations. Sharing information with competitors about parameters in RealPage’s software. As an example, at the request of Willow Bridge’s director of revenue management, Greystar’s director of revenue management supplied its standard auto-accept parameters for RealPage’s software, including the daily and weekly limits and the days of the week for which Greystar used “auto-accept.”

What kind of insanity is this? Your entire argument is based on landlords not caring about occupancy, when that is actually the number one thing they care about. You obviously have no idea how any of this works and your linked source does not say a damn thing about landlords intentionally leaving units vacant.

Your evidence for that is easily had by opening the 5 newest developments in any major metro, and see how many units are available, despite people constantly looking. It’s kind of appalling.

The software literally includes an algorithm that says "this week, you will set the rate for this apartment at $X" based on RP's data.

And, if you want to deviate from that, without being kicked off RP and losing your substantial fee payments, you will follow that rate (and they tell you that they _will_ check), or you can "request an override" from RealPage, that they may allow or deny at their discretion (and RP agents are formally trained that override approvals may not exceed 5% of requests).

> Consistent with their agreement to impose rents generated by RealPage RM Software nearly all the time, Defendants agreed to limit overrides. For example, a RealPage LRO training document states: “Overrides should be few and far between.” Similarly, internal RealPage LRO training documents teach cartel members’ regional managers to beware of “Override Overload” or “rogue” leasing agents who too frequently override the LRO-generated pricing.

> An internal presentation created by Defendant Greystar explicitly acknowledges that RealPage RM Software users should each seek to accept at least 95% of the RealPage-generated prices, emphasizing that “Discipline [o]f using revenue management increases more consistent outcomes.”

> Former Greystar employees have similarly confirmed that negotiating rents other than those set by the RealPage RM Software was unacceptable.

> Even where Participating Landlords do not enable auto-accept, most landlords cannot, on their own, charge rents other than those generated by RealPage’s RM Software— landlords can only “propose an override.” The landlord must then provide a written business justification for why they wish to depart from the RealPage-generated rent.

"Not price fixing", huh?

Just to reiterate that training presentation:

> Discipline [o]f using revenue management increases more consistent outcomes.

https://imgur.com/a/RR2vWnJ

  AUTOMATIC PRICE UPDATES

  New pricing information automatically pushes  to marketing website and ILS listings in real  time.

  During a six month study  with an Entrata client  using Entrata Pricing,  market rents grew 15%  more than a comparable  set of properties within  the same company.

And now they are using AI tools to handle the emails related to renting including price negotiation.

There is a non-trivial amount of data science work put into these tools with the explicit goal of keeping rents high and using all available data (ex. your credit score, history at other buildings they own, your payment history, local pricing landscape and tons more) to extract the maximum you're willing to pay.

Virtually all large landlords use them on just about every channel - email, website chat, SMS and even phone now.

This is why we created https://fless.io to level the playing field and bring some of the same tactics to the renter side in addition to saving the emailing / scheduling hassle.

If you have examples of such a company in other industries, please share.

  Industry          Companies
  ----------------  --------------------------------------
  Apartments        RealPage, Yardi, Rentana, Entrata
  Hotels            IDeaS, Duetto, RoomPriceGenie
  Airlines          PROS, Amadeus
  Grocery           Revionics, Yieldigo, Competera
  Retail            Pricefx, Omnia Retail, Wiser Solutions
  E-commerce        Prisync, Price2Spy, Intelligence Node
  Manufacturing     Zilliant, Vendavo
  Vacation rentals  PriceLabs, Beyond, Wheelhouse
  Events/tickets    DynamO Pricing, Digonex

These companies buying services from Radford are indirectly colluding through Radford, just like RealPage.

https://imgur.com/a/RR2vWnJ

No one cared about those of us hurt by this company to even bother filing a lawsuit against them.

By the way, the home value and income estimates were higher than reality, and his quote was also fairly high - though not the highest

A buyer should also ask the sellers for a lower price after the initial prices are given.

What blows my mind is there are multiple people in this thread saying that that is perfectly moral, ethical and legal, and the people in the class action got lucky because this would have all fallen apart in the courtroom.

My mechanic friend heard about it, and gave me the following warning.

The mechanic I was working with had an application where you entered in symptoms (e.g. belt noise), and it would stack rank plausible-sounding repairs by profitability. (e.g., should you just replace the belt, should you replace the alternator, or replace the A/C compressor) It used the markup of the parts needed for each job, hours you can charge, actual hours worked, turnaround time (part lead time), etc.

I switched mechanics, and the maintenance cost of my car dropped 75%. It also was at least twice as reliable after that.

Apps like that (and the plumber one) should be illegal. Their only purpose is to defraud customers, so the developers + the customers should be facing jail time.

However, that's not a systematic method for lower prices. It just prevents individual cases of price gouging.

Alternatively we could keep the names private. A cryptographic solution would easily serve the need of authorities verifying the right person is in a place without identification, but good luck figuring out how to ensure the tenant has their keys somehow since in the US there are zero pieces of identification you can ensure every citizen has.

(Unless the other party to the contract deliberately asks you in the contract to keep it quiet. But that's something you need to actively agree to.)

Abundance of pricing data depends on whether you make the registration mandatory more than who runs the database.

https://rentregistry.dc.gov/

There is enough turnover with new listings to find the market rate while preventing existing tenants from being screwed over by unreasonable prices.

Australia also almost entirely works off rentals owned by individuals who own 1-3 properties rather than corporate owners so no one landlord has any sway over the market.

I think that narrative is just meant to distract people away from questioning the need for small local landlords, they want people angry at a faceless corporate boogieman instead.

What else do you expect "collective bargaining" to do in a market where every tenant has a different landlord? Your landlord isn't going to care if the tenants of 10,000 other landlords threaten to move out. They only care if you threaten to move out, and then to credibly do that what you need is to show them the unit you could move into which is asking for less.

The real problem is that you need the unit you can threaten to move into to first exist, rather than its construction being inhibited by zoning etc.

How is that collective bargaining when your neighbors have different landlords?

All you're suggesting is to stop paying rent, which anybody can do on their own, with the usual consequences of your credit getting ruined and then the landlord serves you an eviction notice and changes the locks.

Consider the economics of what you're suggesting. Your unit costs $800k when it should cost $200k because of artificial scarcity (zoning), but then the landlord has to pay $800k for it and charge rents high enough to pay back that loan. The way you fix that is by getting the cost of the unit back down to where it should be, i.e. building more units to alleviate the scarcity. Demanding that the landlords charge less without reducing what they have to pay for the building doesn't work, because then who is going to sink $800k to build a new rental unit? Who is going to keep renting out their existing units at a loss instead of turning them into condos or similar? Which then makes the scarcity of rental units worse and causes rents to go up.

On top of that, "puts them out of the game" means that there are no apartments to rent. And it wouldn't even work because you'd not only still have the non-landlord homeowners lobbying to suppressing the housing supply, you'd have the banks making sure you can't actually wipe out the landlords since the landlords owe them way too much money for things to happen that way.

The cost of holding apartments intentionally vacant is large, and has a very tiny effect on pricing unless there's a single player with more market share than exists anywhere I have seen in the US.

In a different arena, parking, it's widely accepted that the best possible way to establish adequate parking is to set prices high enough that there's always a spot available. Anything less results in people not being able to park. Setting apartment prices similarly is beneficial to the public, in that there's always a place to move into.

We need apartment vacancies, they are beneficial to renters, because people need to find housing at all times. Ideally we have a surplus of apartments so that not only do renters have choices but so that prices fall to the cost of providing housing.

Of course, if there are improvements in the rental, you can go beyond the index as the property been "improved", but it's really handy to know each year that it's limited and the exact amount. For 2026 it's locked to 2.14% for example, for everyone.

Second, the historical database should be deleted. And if they can't survive that, so be it. Keeping the spoils of crime should be the crime. Justice still isn't finished.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_venom

The theory says that new units are added when prices are high and building new units is practical. Building new units is inhibited, therefore prices go up, exactly according to the theory.

The problem isn't the theory, it's the inhibiting of adding more units.

There's been an assertion of a "body of literature" but no pointers to it, no assessment of the data quality, no assessment of the validity of the interpretations, etc.

There are entire bodies of literature based on zero evidence, due to epistemic doubt about evidence as grounds. For example, critical geography actively rejects basing their body of literature on evidence, and reaches conclusions about gentrification and displacement and housing production that are quite contrary to both the evidence and standard economic theory. Yet the work of critical geographers is endemic in public policy around urban planning and political debates on housing production in urban areas.

I would agree in general that theory must change to match the evidence, but again, what evidence is at play in any of this thread?

The existing price is high not because it should cost that much to create a new unit. It's because you're only allowed to put one unit on a particular plot of land, which makes the land cost per unit 10x as high as building 10 units there. Adding more units doesn't require you to use lower quality materials or similar, it just requires you to actually build them.

This is trivial to empirically disprove. Look at the listings for similar units in an arbitrary city. Are they all exactly the same price? No, and then the landlord who offers the lower price for an otherwise equivalent unit fills their vacancy sooner.

> They raise rents in lockstep and then offer "specials" like a month off (amortized) that lower initial out-of-pocket costs without affecting the base rent, which gets raised on subsequent lease renewals to make up the difference.

These are obviously gimmicks, but who is requiring you to fall for them? If you're planning to stay somewhere for a long time then look at the base rent and the length of the lease. Let the landlords offering "specials" and short lease terms get taken advantage of by the tenants who know they're going to be moving in a year anyway.

> The only option to avoid this is moving every year (instability being clearly great for community /s) since corporate landlords will not negotiate rates.

An obvious option to avoid this is to avoid corporate landlords. Most rental properties are owned by a "corporation" in the sense that it's an LLC for liability reasons, but that doesn't mean the ones owned by an individual who lives in the same city and has fewer units than you can count on one hand behave the same way as the ones owned by some private equity schmucks, and there are lots of the former.

Also, who wants to rent the same unit for 30 years? Renting should be for people who haven't saved a down payment yet and people who are planning to move soon. When we're seeing people in middle age who want to stay in the same place but still can't afford to buy anything there, we need to be doing something about the unaffordability of buying rather than accepting the premise that we're going to continue screwing them into needing to rent.

The zoning restrictions cause the higher rents by themselves. No collusion is required and no solution is possible without addressing that.

And if you do address that then how is the collusion supposed to work?

Not clear to me that is the right approach, or if owning rentals should be more of a fixed income approach (or even speculative - profits only come from the sale of the property).

This actually works unless you inhibit the construction of new units. Naturally that's what we've been doing, which is why it isn't working. But the solution is to stop inhibiting the construction of new units.

Because the alternatives don't actually work. Unless you can build enough units to meet demand, there aren't enough units. Which means you either have high prices which suppress demand because people who can't afford them are forced out, or shortages because you're imposing some inadvisable price controls and then instead of being unable to get a unit because you can't afford the rent, you can't get a unit because they're all occupied and no one is adding more.

I think you might have the problem backwards. Realpage was about buyer collusion, and that wouldn't look any different from the prices naturally just rising in a market with more demand/less supply because even sellers who aren't colluding would still raise their prices if they saw that that was the going rate in the area.

When there are multiple competing factors all influencing price simultaneously it's very hard to accurately determine how much any particular factor contributed, or what the "actual price" would have been without them.

This is actually essentially the problem that justifies markets as an efficient way to arrive at fair prices - it's computationally too expensive to calculate the precise supply/demand ratios at any given moment, and demand can change much faster than supply can adjust (and nobody could ever really know how elastic demand is for things like local housing markets anyway).

So sellers want to respond to changes in demand by raising prices, because the business model of housing rentals is matching short term demand/pricing/risk to long term costs/costs/risk. But every buyer has their own demand preferences and every supplier has a different product with different fixed costs, and everybody knows their own demand preference and ability to provide supply, so the aggregate price a market settles at "collapses" all that information without explicit coordination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

If there truly is an increase in demand, as a buyer you probably do want rents to increase, because otherwise you get shortages like in Berlin where there is nothing to rent. So that's why coordinating to withold inventory with other sellers is bad, it creates a shortage anyway and only a small number of participants need to do it to move the entire market

The best solution is to contact the building but this is time intensive and you get a lot of spammy followup which is why we created https://fless.io to automate this process and help you find what is actually available and not just what zillow or the management company's website lists. It's still the best way to know what is truly available.

Look at the difference in prices between recent home sales and listed home prices, it's exactly the sort of information differential I'm talking about.

The US protects its homeowners above all, which is why there are these public databases of true sale prices of real estate. Renters should have the same protections and information too.

It's not very common for residential rental agreements to differ substantially from the listed price in the US. It is quite common for long time tenants to pay a different (usually much lower) rate than new listings (often as a result of government regulation or just people being nice to each other).

What exactly are you expecting to uncover by knowing what people are paying for rent? I actually have nothing against that in principle. I just don't understand how that establishes any kind of evidence that somebody is doing something wrong.

Housing needs to be decommodified. It needs to stop being a retirement plan. We need to stop letting people hoard it. We need to stop subsidizing exurbs and making it illegal to build the kind of walkable communities people actually like. Case in point: Red Vienna [1].

As another commenter noted, this is in every industry. Utilities are a particularly bad one including telcos. All the best ISPs in the US are municipally owned. Chattanooga was the first really big poster child for this.

Privatization of all these things is just rent-seeking behavior.

So many of society's problems come down to housing being too expensive. Anything that makes it expensive needs to be stamped out and that includes RealPage as well as Airbnb/VRBO.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY&t=191s

This is a predictable outcome of commerce due to the limited supply of land and is described in some detail by Adam Smith and developed by later thinkers like Riccardo and George (who took it to its logical conclusion and inspired the board game Monopoly).

During the 20th century, economics was wholesale rewritten to blur the lines between land and capital so as to bury this awkward conversation.

The general recommendation of these early economists was taxing land - moderate in the case of Smith, up to 100% per George. This amounts to public ownership of part of the profits of land ownership.

No, it is not. Communism tried that and all communist countries failed spectacularly. Public ownership in practice means that everyone has rights but zero responsibilities.

Taking people's private property is not a solution to any crisis. This whole housing thing looks like "I want to have my cake and eat it too".

But then USSR wasn't really communist either, it was far more defined by dictatorship of individuals; which is diametrically opposed to communism.

If you have people living in palaces whilst others starve then you don't have communism - the first principle of which is that benefit of labour is split under egalitarian principles. Whilst rich people getting richer, and the devaluing of people typifies capitalism.

From my considerations, we need to limit wage disparity, eg by a top rate of tax at 100% (I know how that will be received here!). That limits power that can be accrued through wealth too - no more billionaires who can by elections. We also need to give ownership of the benefits of labour to the people; wage limits does that, but a more direct link is possible too and that can aid transition from Western Capitalism to a more equal distribution of wealth. Ultimately, globally we're going to face far more issues with migration as the effects of our past excesses take hold; redistribution of wealth across nations also needs to be accepted if we're going to manage that transition with less war and bloodshed.

Housing does allow for market competition. The New York housing department is the worst landlord in the city going by HPD complaints.

Housing pricing and scarcity is driven by population growth and wage suppression from plantation migration policy.

On that basis, the 'free market' should be called the 'free, competitive market' - without competition, it has little value. Businesses should be required to compete and to opeerate in competitive markets. Anything anti-competitive should be treated harshly.

(Seven has been experimentally determined, but I can't recall where.)

I'm not sure I understand where you are going with this? Are you suggesting that a new product cannot enter a market without a number of simultaneous competitors?

If I want to roll out fibre to an area that doesn't have it, can I? If I want to build a fresh-produce store in a town that doesn't have one, then I need to find someone else to compete with?

Lots and lots of businesses operate as quasi-monopolies if you look hard enough. Especially in smaller and rural environments. Lots and lots of places have one gas station, one mechanic, one vet, one doctor, one diner and so on.

Your use of the word "require" seems difficult to implement. What if no-one wants to compete with me? If Apple stops making Macs, does MS have to stop making Windows?

HN is filled with stories of exorbitant rates from AT&T and Comcast that get slashed 70%+, speeds doubled, as soon as a newcomer is ready to offer fiber.

In fact, there was even a story here of a community where they formed a company that could not have done it, or not without a huge effort, but just hinted that they were exploring offering fiber to a town - and just that hint was enough for Comcast to say "wait, wait, we did the math and you all have been overpaying for internet!"

Can’t wait to get like $300 out of this. /s

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Land ownership is the biggest business and the source of the biggest conspiracies.

Billionaires do fund the land rent narrative though. Presumably because it takes the focus from their own economic parasitism.

But RealPage isn't a supply issue? It's easy to price gouge consumers because housing is inelastic. And the fine they got is a slap on the wrist!

Price gouging is more widespread than one isolated price fixing case. It's easy to achieve in an inelastic market. As one example, moving costs money so rentiers can raise rents as long as there is a switching cost to moving. Deregulation doesn't address the fundamental inelasticity of the housing market.

Your comment also seems to be oblivious to the role that interest rates play. Mortgages are not corporate-owned in the sense of the parent comment, but mortgages are a cash flow from home owners to corporate financiers - a cash flow from the working class to the wealthy. ZIRP led to high prices; with rising rates, homeowners are incentivized to hold on to their properties rather than move. These are issues of macroeconomic finance and wealth disparity, not "building codes and zoning".

While you're right that the parent's comment of corporate ownership of houses is off base, multi-family housing is majority corporate owned. Multi-family housing is a huge portion of the housing market, particularly in cities where prices are highest. Corporations aren't "just scapegoats" here either - they are parasitizing cash flow from workers here as well. Corporate profits is where the money in high housing prices ultimately goes.

There is a reason billionaires astroturf YIMBYism. It's precisely because it doesn't threaten their class interests. Housing is a basic necessity and should be guaranteed. But that would involve taxing corporate and billionaire assets to finance, and tackling the issue of economic parasitism head on.

For example- do you have a mortgage? Almost certainly in your name, you have to be very large to receive a mortgage as a corporation. If you're holding a property in an LLC but the mortgage in your name, that's classic piercing the corporate veil and will take an attorney about 10 minutes to shred that in court

Not that it wasn't predictable. Follow the money: who owns the property and REITs that rely on squeezing renters for every cent? Certainly not lawyers and judges. /s

To see this settle under these terms is just sad

It's like Ticketmaster. The public will continue to suffer more BS overpayyment because of these practices