Most landlords arent big corporate in the USA either especially in areas where the housing crisis is the worst.

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.

Services like RealPage provide information that allows the small landlord to act like corporate overlords, praise be American corporatism.

How about an app that collectively bargains rents algorithmically? Call it RedPage lol.

That's basically a listing search page that allows you to sort by price.

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.

Collective bargaining your landlord can't ignore is you and your neighbors all withholding your rent payments until your leases are renegotiated.

[delayed]

That doesn’t work you all get sued and hit with a judgment to pay late fees

Depends on how big the union is. There is a certain size where "just sue them all" is no longer practical.

It's 1 lawsuit with multiple defendants, class size doesnt impact practicality.

Put the leases under an LLC and let them sue that.

A landlord is going to be very sceptical before writing residential leases to an LLC.

> Collective bargaining your landlord can't ignore is you and your neighbors all withholding your rent payments until your leases are renegotiated.

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.

The landlord class is very powerful and they use that power to suppress the housing supply so if collective bargaining puts them out of the game that's a good thing!

It still isn't "collective bargaining" when you all have different landlords.

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.

Rental prices are set at the edge, so you only need to own a fraction of the market to drive rent increases. Corporate landlords absolutely do this.

The "mom and pop" landlord who owns a few houses is much less likely to keep a property vacant to support higher rents. They have taxes, insurance, and probably debt to pay off. They need cash flow; they'll be more likely to cut their rent a bit to get a tenant.

Show me the math where a large landlord can make money by keeping apartments intentionally vacant. Corporate landlords have no less need for cash flow than mom and pop landlords.

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.

We have something similar in Spain, except instead of "comparable rentals in the area" there is a index (called IRAV (Índice de Referencia de los Alquileres)) maintained by the government each year, which limits how much rents can be increased. My landlord just reference that each year, it's easy for me to check if it's right, then that's it. For the areas where supply is limited ("áreas tensionadas"), as some areas like Barcelona is geographically limited to expansion, there is a total limit as well, independent of the IRAV.

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.