RealPage Rent Price Fixing

Huh? Large landlords are unable to raise rents significantly above the local market rate, unless they have an effective local monopoly or collude with other landlords. Rent prices are not byproducts of a financial services scheme. When landlords ask for rent much higher than the market rate, tenants eventually just move out.

There is no order book for residential rents. There is data for past / ongoing rents, which every major landlord who uses RealPage already has an abundance of. RealPage is providing some model for what the market can bear, in a market that is 100% inelastic. This is price fixing.

Isn't OP saying they are doing this because of rent control? (e.g not being able to change rent selectively, only able to constantly increase rent?)

No I'm implying that it allows landlords to collude on pricing without needing to actually meet and discuss it. I can't predict the future of the market so my safe bet is to raise rent each year, because in the event that I desperately need to at some point in the future, I won't be able to.

Off-topic, but actually a number of landlords raise prices in sync with each other because they use price-setting services like RealPage that intentionally try to maximize rents across multiple landlords. They just settled a lawsuit over this: https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-realpage-settlement-r...

people dont want to pay 2 rents for no reason though, unless the rents are very cheap, so they won't be able to price these things high anymore. probably

Landlords have wide pricing power. They basically get all of the money. Rents rise until merchants make minimal margins. If the law says that wages have to go up, that depresses margins and therefore rents.

Rents are set by market supply and demand, not arbitrarily.

The thing I don't understand in all this is how on earth are rents secret? I mean, can't a landlord fix prices just by looking at nearby rental listings and matching?Are there certain key details that that the software and its back-end can share that enable price fixing better than open listings?If tenants were hard to get, looking at nearby listings would motivate the landlord to go cheaper. (I do understand that the platform in question encourages compliance with the recommende

Add to this the 3-part RealPage grift:- build a platform that tells landlords, algorithmically, how much they can feasibly afford to raise rents YoY, based on what other landlords in their area are charging for similar properties- write terms of service that require them to use your pricing suggestions most of the time- target large-scale landlords in big metro areas, to get a lot of market penetration relative to the size of your customer base -- so that when you tell your custo