- A group of lawsuits accuse large landlords of price-fixing the market rate of rent in the United States
- A complaint filed by Washington D.C.’s Attorney General alleges 14 landlords in the district are sharing competitively sensitive data through RealPage, a real estate software provider
- RealPage recommends prices for roughly 4.5 million housing units in the United States
- RealPage told CNBC that its landlord customers are under no obligation to take their price suggestions
A group of renters in the U.S. say their landlords are using software to deliver inflated rent hikes.
“We’ve been told as tenants by employees of Equity that the software takes empathy out of the equation. So they can charge whatever the software tells them to charge,” said Kevin Weller, a tenant at Portside Towers since 2021.
Tenants say the management started to increase prices substantially after giving renters concessions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
I work in this industry at a decent level with these companies. They regularly try to worm out of contracts, get mixed up in unethical shit, and do things like this. We are literally one step removed from organized crime a lot of the time.
I’m not convinced state housing is the solution, but extensive regulatory oversight is badly needed.
Price fixing is normal and doesn’t require explicit collusion.
Have you ever seen gas stations on 2 sides of the road with the exact same prices? It’s a genlemen’s agreement.
This lawsuit will go nowhere.
I think one could make the argument that the shared software creates a situation of collusion. Gas stations can see what their neighboring gas stations are charging via the giant sign with the price per gallon listed but there’s nothing uniting them with every other gas station in the city to ensure nobody charges less than anyone else.
Man this seems like a great target for Anonymous to permanently cripple… 🙏🏼
Why isnt ratethelandlord.org more popular?
Because when the deck is stacked against you with even finding a place to rent - let alone one of decent quality at an affordable price - reviews might not be that helpful?
If you’re starving, a stale hunk of bread is better than none.
What are you even talking about and how is it relevant?
Reviews are very important tools. A lot of times you don’t know how responsive a landlord will be, if they’re adequately handling health/safety issues, or how invasive they are.
Reviews are one of very few tools to help prevent people from falling into traps.
I’m not reading any disagreement with this POV from above - reviews are useful.
However, it’s also common for those looking for housing to be in a place of urgency.
In Los Angeles, it’s very uncommon to have a landlord that will let you see an apartment any more than two weeks ahead of time, unless it’s brand new and still under construction. ( brand new apartments in LA can be extremely overpriced - downtown is filled with studio apartments that will charge you $4000+ USD for roughly 30m2 of space )
Most people in Los Angeles will start looking about a month ahead of time, feel out what they’re looking for vs what they can afford, and then go on a 1-2 week long scramble at the end to find anything as their emotional and logistical clock ticks down to homelessness. The security of having a roof, especially in that stressful state, becomes far more important perceptually than previous tenants’ opinions of the landlord at that time, especially knowing that their landlord of building office may be completely different, given the inherent one-sidedness of a review and the rate at which property management changes hands.
In writing, this likely sounds hyperbolic. But this story is common, especially in the emotional space of the moment, and the inherent housing pressure upon the vast majority of prospective tenants is ( in my opinion ) so strong and so stark that the experience is really nothing like those in the market for consumable / luxury goods where the buyer has ample agency and time for making an informed decision.
A new TV is not something a person needs, it’s something that they want. They can afford the wait, the research, and the time to peruse reviews. The urgency at the time of decision is low.
Housing is something that everyone needs, where the supply and the quality are severely limited by wealth and free time.
Since the constrains and urgency at the time of decision tends to be much higher for housing, reviews - as important and as useful as they are - are one of the first things to disappear from the decision process, even when they are available, relevant, and can confidently be verified.
By the time most people have the chance and reason to read them, they’re already in too deep to truly factor them into consideration.
This is essentially the same way that my employer sets pay ranges.
They send a list of job titles and descriptions to an outside company along with the number of employees and how much each of those employees are paid. Lots of other employers send their info and the outside company tries to match up all the job descriptions and then sends back to all of the employers what the “market range” is for every job.
My employer then decides where in that range they think is “competitive” (hint: its near the bottom). That’s the amount HR and Finance are willing to approve when hiring someone into a role, regardless of experience. The wages are only “competitive” if every other employer goes along with the scheme and offers the same amount.
My (former) job did that. The firm they hired just flst out omitted every regional job equivalent that paid higher, and kept their scope narrowed to places that paid at least $10k less a year. They then recommended pay cuts everywhere, which mostly amounted to cutting enough labor costs just enough to pay for the contract that did the research.
I took it as a sign to start applying elsewhere: glad I did.
