281–290 of 646 posts
I am excited and optimistic that we appear to be applying economic principles to housing! Now that we're getting rid of centralized price controls / collusion, next can we do supply/demand?
On the demand side it would be nice to keep PE firms from hoovering up all the single family homes. https://www.thesling.org/are-hedge-funds-and-private-equity-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting rid of the law of supply and demand is like getting rid of Boyle’s law. Legislate whatever you want but the behavior those laws model will still exist. I prefer to think of it this way. I like my markets free as in GPL, not free as in BSD. That is, I want the market itself to be free with limitations on the participants that keep them from taking it for themselves.
Uh, you're reading the wrong thing about it. Fixing supply and demand means things like punishing vacancies with taxation, promoting construction with tax breaks, and removing the demand by severely limiting rent seeking real estate investors.
Curious where the line is supposed to be for gathering market information and making pricing decisions. Surely it would be legal if I had an employee scour all the rental listings in my area and use that to give me price distributions for similar units to the ones I’m advertising. But according to the DOJ if I hire a company to do this, it’s not? What if I have two units to list and it wouldn’t make sense for me to h…
You absolutely can "share cost" publicly, but colluding on pricing is where it get's questionable.
The platform itself by itself to analyze pricing isn't a problem, where I think the problem arises is when the contract for you to use the platform tie you and your properties pricing to the platforms suggestion. Thus making the platform the deciding factor.
It's dicey and will be an interesting read. Rentals are an interesting industry as is, many will sit 80% full rather than 100% because of platforms like this that can squeeze more out of them. I've rented from apartments that use this platform and it's wild. Every renewal was either same or cheaper rent for moving across the hall vs staying for a 20% increase in the same apartment. It's designed to squeeze and put pressure on you. Shady.
I am excited and optimistic that we appear to be applying economic principles to housing! Now that we're getting rid of centralized price controls / collusion, next can we do supply/demand?
They say they want dense, walkable, core neighborhoods but when people actually try to build denser housing it's like pulling teeth.
There actually is some building happening but the demand is so far ahead of the supply that it's not nearly enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting rid of the law of supply and demand is like getting rid of Boyle’s law. Legislate whatever you want but the behavior those laws model will still exist. I prefer to think of it this way. I like my markets free as in GPL, not free as in BSD. That is, I want the market itself to be free with limitations on the participants that keep them from taking it for themselves.
Uh, you're reading the wrong thing about it. Fixing supply and demand means things like punishing vacancies with taxation, promoting construction with tax breaks, and removing the demand by severely limiting rent seeking real estate investors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the demand side it would be nice to keep PE firms from hoovering up all the single family homes. https://www.thesling.org/are-hedge-funds-and-private-equity-...
Would be interesting to see what would happen if renters had the option to buy the underlying property/unit somehow after being a tenant for a certain time. The goal should be ownership for folks who want it, not a nation of renters.
I like it but that seems like a system VERY susceptible to abuse.
Curious where the line is supposed to be for gathering market information and making pricing decisions. Surely it would be legal if I had an employee scour all the rental listings in my area and use that to give me price distributions for similar units to the ones I’m advertising. But according to the DOJ if I hire a company to do this, it’s not? What if I have two units to list and it wouldn’t make sense for me to h…
That's not what RealPage did. RealPage (in landlord's terms) "uses proprietary data from other subscribers to suggest rents and term"—not just publicly available data. Additionally, there's a market impact level to this. When you control 70% of the market, you're a monopoly, regardless of whether you're controlling market prices because you're a landlord or because you're just telling the landlord what price to use.…
Landlords also don’t have monopoly pricing power, they’re making tradeoffs. They can’t list their unit for a million per month or else it would never sell. They can’t list it for a dollar because they would lose money and be flooded with applicants.
They’re trading between the highest price they can charge and the unit sitting vacant. AFAIK this is the value RealPage adds, it predicts what the optimal price would be.
If it were instead doing something like predicting the market price is X, but telling landlords to set it at 1.3X and stick to their guns while units sit vacant and that eventually renters would have to give in, then it would be a price fixing scheme.
Discovering the market price is not a price fixing scheme. Otherwise the NYSE is a price fixing scheme, far more than RealPage.
I am excited and optimistic that we appear to be applying economic principles to housing! Now that we're getting rid of centralized price controls / collusion, next can we do supply/demand?
On the demand side it would be nice to keep PE firms from hoovering up all the single family homes. https://www.thesling.org/are-hedge-funds-and-private-equity-...
[0]: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001687229/a154763..., "“We operate in markets with strong demand drivers, high barriers to entry, and high rent growth potential, primarily in the Western United States, Florida, and the Southeast United States.”
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1562401/000119312513..., "The continuing development of apartment buildings and condominium units in many of our target markets increases the supply of housing and exacerbates competition for tenants."