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

161–168 of 168 posts

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

#161

Post by cheriot »

comte7092 wrote: post #77
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 discretionary purchases, housing is a necessity. Regardless, if any of those are shown to be an elaborate price fixing scheme, I would hope that government officials would take action. I don’t see the need to be so needlessly negative.

Cities restrict construction of housing to such a degree that focusing on this topic is a distraction. It let's people point to a irrelevant boogieman and say zoning/permitting/codes don't need to change.

To the Senator's credit, she's investigating other oligopolies as well.

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

#162

Post by fsckboy »

reeddavid wrote: post #109

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.…

> We're considered a liberal city, but plenty of our residents have really conservative views around housing and work against increasing housing supply.

you can't create a system with politically "liberal" rules ("let's have the government control the economy") and then say it's "conservatives" who are holding things up.

the politically conservative position would be let owners of property do what they want with it, including developing it into more housing if they want.

not saying one system is better than the other, just saying you're simply using liberal and conservative to mean good and bad.

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

#163

Post by comte7092 »

cheriot wrote: post #161
comte7092 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hotels and flights are discretionary purchases, housing is a necessity. Regardless, if any of those are shown to be an elaborate price fixing scheme, I would hope that government officials would take action. I don’t see the need to be so needlessly negative.

Cities restrict construction of housing to such a degree that focusing on this topic is a distraction. It let's people point to a irrelevant boogieman and say zoning/permitting/codes don't need to change. To the Senator's credit, she's investigating other oligopolies as well.

Both can be true. I for one am fully on board with the change zoning movement. I also think it should be managed at the state/local level though, so as a senator, she’s focusing on more or less the right thing.

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

#164

Post by ryan_lane »

Aunche wrote: post #129
loeg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The innovation here isn't the automated pricing, but convincing all the landlords in an area to collude by sharing pricing and demand data with a central organizer. Humans could do the pricing and it would still be illegal collusion.

If they are really facilitating collusion, then they would be selling a broken product. For example, for simplicity's sake, let's say that a city has a lot of landlords, but all their units are identical and they all follow the RealPage algorithm for price suggestions. Realpage suggests that they charge an exorbitant $10000 per unit, which leads to only 50% of all units being occupied, so your expected value of $5000…

There was another recent article related to this product, that showed large-scale landlord (4,000+ units) using this product to run experiments around their vacancy rate vs their revenue, to figure out how much they could raise rates by participating in the collusion. They started at 5% and were testing 15% vacancies. That's a considerable number of units to remove from the market, and basically an unheard of vacancy number to target, but they were showing higher revenue with this model.

It's pretty obvious that this is a net negative on society.

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

#165

Post by ryan_lane »

Aunche wrote: post #145
loeg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your arbitrary figure of $9,000 -> $10,000 causing a 40% drop in occupancy is wholly invented. You could instead imagine a (still completely fictitious) figure that makes your argument look bad -- e.g., that the raise in rates causes a 0% drop in occupancy. Then the landlords/algorithm win by raising prices. One reason occupancy rates might remain relatively stable even in the face of rising prices is if consumers ha…

> that the raise in rates causes a 0% drop in occupancy. Housing demand isn't really that inelastic. People will move to less crowded cities if they become too expensive. Americans tend to have much more living space per capita than most of the world, so there is a lot of room to move in with roommates or family. > all of your competitors collude to also raise their rates similarly. Realpage doesn't control the price…

> People will move to less crowded cities if they become too expensive.

The vast majority of people die within 10 miles of where they were born. People want to live near their families, and for the most part do not want to move to another city, and won't even if their rent is difficult to afford.

> Realpage doesn't control the prices for the majority of housing in the US, the majority of rental units in the US, or even the majority of multifamily rental units in the US.

They don't need to. They just need to control the prices for particular cities, because market prices are heavily tied to regions and not to the entire US. Detroit's housing market crashing didn't affect SF's rent.

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

#166

Post by ryan_lane »

vkou wrote: post #12
timy2shoes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RealPage is Cartel As A Servics (CAAS), by allowing landlords to collude through a 3rd party to raise rents.

How is it different from just eyeballing market price from looking at similar units, and renting yours out for +10-15% more? Is there some core part of US land policy that only works if landlords behave like low-information market participants? If these landlords were colluding with eachother to punish defectors that undercut them, that would be a cartel. If they are all reacting to a shortage by raising their prices…

> How is it different from just eyeballing market price from looking at similar units, and renting yours out for +10-15% more?

Landlords don't always advertise, and they also negotiate rents. Knowing the actual market price isn't easy (and sometimes not possible), because that information isn't publicly available and certainly isn't real-time.

RealPage is getting private market information from landlords, and using it to coordinate rent prices, including coordinating actions to remove supply from the market to artificially increase prices. This removes competition from an otherwise competitive market. This is collusion via a middleman.

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

#167

Post by dools »

vkou wrote: post #7
colechristensen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m quite happy to see this having lived in apartments driven by automated pricing which is obviously a new kind of cartel.

Is it really a cartel, or is it just landlords squeezing every penny that they can? With there being a lot of pennies to squeeze due to a double-whammy of supply shortages, and growth in wages for the upper 30% of society? If people didn't have spare money, rents wouldn't be growing (As nobody would be able to pay), and if vacancies were higher, landlords would have to accept lowball offers.

Define spare money. Since housing isn’t optional, and the cost of being homeless is extremely high, people will cease practically all other consumption in order to pay rent

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

#168

Post by turtleyacht »

treeman79 wrote: post #140
turtleyacht wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell us more.

Natural gas + carbon monoxide, oddly didn’t have the rotten egg smell. When we previewed home all the windows were open. After signing paperwork we closed up windows. Hour later we noticed smell. 3 month of being told it was carpet. Floor, paint. They inspecting and saying everything is fine. Our deductive reasoning skills where nil fairly quick into this. Finally called gas company even. They started screaming for u…

Thank-you. Glad to hear you got better. After reading this, a recent combo monitor helped ease my doubts.
Post reply on HN