Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US reps urge DOJ to investigate anticompetitive conduct affecting apartment rent

klobuchar.senate.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 168 posts

Re: US reps urge DOJ to investigate anticompetitive conduct affecting apartment rent

#101

Post by mihaic »

jmyeet wrote: post #21

Price controls are ineffective long term but can be a useful stopgap measure in the short term. The only solution to this is dealing with supplyside issues, notably the artificial constraints on housing supply. This is longer term.So the pricing algorithms are a natural reaction to market forces. Here are some more important things you can do in the short term to increase supply: 1. Outlaw (at the local and state lev…

The fact that you're actually presenting a reasonable solution and you're being downvoted shows how much capitalist propaganda has poluted the mainstream.

Either that, or the majority of people here are real estate speculators, which I very much doubt.

Re: US reps urge DOJ to investigate anticompetitive conduct affecting apartment rent

#102

Post by ceejayoz »

Aunche wrote: post #88
cheriot wrote: post #30

> pricing algorithms to adjust prices on vacant apartments in real time… The program may also induce landlords to charge the rents recommended by the algorithm, putting upward pressure on prices and decreasing the availability of affordable apartments. Wait until she hears about hotels and flights. > The software analyzes non-public data that RealPage gathers from its property management clients, including confidenti…

> The program may also induce landlords to charge the rents recommended by the algorithm, putting upward pressure on prices and decreasing the availability of affordable apartments. This is definitely nonsense grandstanding. I have no idea what they're even trying to say here. The program may also induce landlords to decrease rents as recommended by the algorithm, putting downward pressure on prices and increasing th…

> The program may also induce landlords to decrease rents as recommended by the algorithm...

The algorithm's sole purpose - how it gets customers and makes money - is to maximize revenue and prevent that as much as possible.

Re: US reps urge DOJ to investigate anticompetitive conduct affecting apartment rent

#103

Post by lumb63 »

brookst wrote: post #76
cheriot wrote: post #30

> pricing algorithms to adjust prices on vacant apartments in real time… The program may also induce landlords to charge the rents recommended by the algorithm, putting upward pressure on prices and decreasing the availability of affordable apartments. Wait until she hears about hotels and flights. > The software analyzes non-public data that RealPage gathers from its property management clients, including confidenti…

> Wait until she hears about hotels and flights. What is the single pricing system that the majority of hotels or flights use? If there is one, and it's used for tacit coordination of prices, then yes, that should be pursued as an illegal cartel as well. But my understanding was that each airline uses their own yield management algorithms. Delta does not use software that knows about price increases at American befor…

This is very similar to what companies like PayScale do, from my understanding. I have a friend who works there and has told me that companies pay a them for employer-provided salary data and provides them a model for what they should pay employees.

“Efficient market” perhaps is not all it was once cracked up to be.

Re: US reps urge DOJ to investigate anticompetitive conduct affecting apartment rent

#104

Post by notch656a »

Aunche wrote: post #100
rtpg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hotels and flights are, granted, less essential than a place to live. Remember, you _have to live somewhere_. That is a functional difference compared to other "market-based" things (never mind that "market-based solutions" are a lot less workable when atomicity is lost. Yeah yeah, regulations making things harder to build, I think more should be built! But there are real, "wanted" things in the way of just having ma…

A place to live is a market based thing. There's no real difference between what RealPage is doing with housing, and what the CME Group is doing with crops. They both facilitate price discovery. The CME also is helping farmers maximize their profits. The difference is that farmers are allowed to grow as much crops as they want (perhaps a little too much in drought-prone areas), so food prices grow much more reasonabl…

If you spend some time in South America you quickly find that most everyone can afford some type of housing, it's just a matter of how shitty it is going to end up.

The vast majority of the US has set some building codes that basically say "be rich enough to build to this code or be homeless." One can debate the merits of whether the streets are safer than a sub-code house. If you go somewhere like Asuncion, Paraguay you'll find people living in a shack who would end up homeless in the US.

IMO notably missing in zoning and building codes is they tend to consider the harmful effects of substandard zoning / code. But they seldom consider the harmful effects of the tradeoffs made to get it up to code/zone, including less money for healthcare, education, healthy foods, investing in your children, etc. Often it boils down to "fuck you, got mine, I won't risk some elevated risk of spread of fire to help keep you from freezing to death."

Re: US reps urge DOJ to investigate anticompetitive conduct affecting apartment rent

#105

Post by joshuamorton »

_huayra_ wrote: post #82
cheriot wrote: post #30

> pricing algorithms to adjust prices on vacant apartments in real time… The program may also induce landlords to charge the rents recommended by the algorithm, putting upward pressure on prices and decreasing the availability of affordable apartments. Wait until she hears about hotels and flights. > The software analyzes non-public data that RealPage gathers from its property management clients, including confidenti…

>This is identical to how employers share salary information. Friendly reminder to all: you can opt out of most of this. Most employers subscribe to The Work Number, but you can opt out of your data being shared here: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze Note you will still see your current employer submitting data if you log in, but it's not visible to other employers who participate.

The work number isn't what's being discussed here. It's companies like Culpeper and Radford who get aggregate data from your employer and in return provide market benchmark information.

Re: US reps urge DOJ to investigate anticompetitive conduct affecting apartment rent

#106

Post by admax88qqq »

brookst wrote: post #79
skeeter2020 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flight prices are adjusted far more frequently than rental properties. Just get updates on a tracked flight ~6 months from now and watch it change weekly or even daily.

RealPage adjusts rental property pricing daily: https://www.realpage.com/videos/yieldstar-optimizes-rent-pri...

People's rent doesn't change daily

Re: US reps urge DOJ to investigate anticompetitive conduct affecting apartment rent

#107

Post by asdff »

rtpg wrote: post #44
cheriot wrote: post #30

> pricing algorithms to adjust prices on vacant apartments in real time… The program may also induce landlords to charge the rents recommended by the algorithm, putting upward pressure on prices and decreasing the availability of affordable apartments. Wait until she hears about hotels and flights. > The software analyzes non-public data that RealPage gathers from its property management clients, including confidenti…

Hotels and flights are, granted, less essential than a place to live. Remember, you _have to live somewhere_. That is a functional difference compared to other "market-based" things (never mind that "market-based solutions" are a lot less workable when atomicity is lost. Yeah yeah, regulations making things harder to build, I think more should be built! But there are real, "wanted" things in the way of just having ma…

Hardly anyone says "I have $200, where can I fly." Usually its "I have to go to X for y reasons, X is already booked and paid for, lets get a flight" at which point you are extorted by the dynamic price model for a flight you must take. It's somewhat hilarious when Spirit in particular overbooks, and tries to offer you money to take a flight some other day, assuming you can just rearrange everything in your life around this airline's fraught booking department. Like sure, let me go call the hotel and the rental car company and the venue and my boss and tell them I am attempting to move heaven and earth at the last minute for $108.

Re: US reps urge DOJ to investigate anticompetitive conduct affecting apartment rent

#108

Post by woodruffw »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #63
woodruffw wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What comparison between hotels and flights is being missed? I don't know as much about hotel pricing, but my understanding of flight pricing is that it's done with buckets of fare classes: prices are set in buckets, and they only go up (or down) as each bucket is exhausted (or re-opened, if a ticket is canceled). I'm sure it's more complicated than that these days, but I don't think it's directly comparable to the re…

Flight prices are adjusted far more frequently than rental properties. Just get updates on a tracked flight ~6 months from now and watch it change weekly or even daily.

I think that's irrelevant to what I'm saying: the prices on airline fares can go up and down in any time increment, because what drives them (to my understanding) is not opaque algorithmic pricing. If they're being pulled from the airline's GDS, it's just the bucket's price.

Re: US reps urge DOJ to investigate anticompetitive conduct affecting apartment rent

#109

Post by reeddavid »

The recent outrage over RealPage seems misplaced, at least here in Seattle where demand for housing is so much higher than supply. There are so many restrictions on new housing. We're considered a liberal city, but plenty of our residents have really conservative views around housing and work against increasing housing supply.

It seems to me that RealPage simply helps landlords assess the market price for apartments. Sort of like how "Redfin Estimate" and Zillow's "Zestimate" help homeowners assess the market value of their house. The reason houses and apartments are expensive is because the market rate is so high.

My test for whether RealPage is anticompetitive would be: does RealPage induce multiple landlords to withhold apartments from the market in order to intentionally restrict supply and drive up rents? (Or, does RealPage just clue them in to how high the market rents are?)

Post reply on HN