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Comments (103)
- rabidheuristics“None of the companies admitted fault or liability. They did, however, agree to stop providing Realpage with their nonpublic data for use as an input in Realpage’s revenue management system’s price recommendations, and to stop using Realpage’s RMS in ways that use competitors’ non-public data to inform pricing recommendations”.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.
- epistasisWe need a public rental registry of rental prices that anybody can browse, analyze, etc. The information disparity is a problem.However, that's not a systematic method for lower prices. It just prevents individual cases of price gouging.
- LucasoatoWhat about a law that bans house ownership and rentals unless you are a physical person and not a company? What would be the cons of such a thing?
- exabrial_thats it_ ???
- skew-aberration"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."Adam Smith, The Wealth of NationsLand ownership is the biggest business and the source of the biggest conspiracies.
- throwitaway222I've been saying this for a while, but there is a cottage industry like RealPage in pretty much every industry. These companies need to be slammed out of existence for anti-competitive pricing and collusion. So much corruption. I'm so sick of fraud and corruption.
- anonundefined
- mmoossI wonder what empirical and theoretical substance there is to the idea that the cost of living is due to lack of competition (in zero-to-one markets), and that competition is the solution to much of this.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.
- aetherspawnYep sue propertyme next
- jmyeetIt's both funny and sad to see the mental gymnastics of people trying to find solutions to this when the solution is real simple: it's public ownership.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
- robbiet480I leased at two RealPage properties for a combined 151 months. Both of them were confirmed to be colluding with one another and they were both confirmed as “high software collusion” by an expert. I calculated that the max payout I could get is ~$83,000 for the estimated amount I was overcharged rent for those ~12 years.Can’t wait to get like $300 out of this. /s
- 59percentmoreRealPage's competition were doing the exact same thing and completely escaped oversight or retribution. The rental market is corrupt and crooked nationwide, and these lawsuits flubbed a chance at making a real change.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, judges, and politicians. /s