Up to a Quarter of Rental Inflation Is Due to Price-Fixing
(thebignewsletter.com)107 points by pseudolus 10 months ago
107 points by pseudolus 10 months ago
In NYC I can tell you that the metropolitan area lost about 500,000 people since 2020, added ~20-30k housing units per year in that same time. The vacancy rate somehow dropped dramatically despite this and rents also rose dramatically. I've yet to see any good explanation for this, yet you'll still see people advocate for building more housing as the solution.
Simply using the rental vacancy rate as a proxy for supply and demand does not work, since there are lots of factors that can affect vacancies. One of then, as outlined in the article, is landlords keep units off the market to drive up prices.
The explanation is that there isn't enough housing to meet demand. That's it. Until there is, prices will keep going up even when building more units.
Landlords wouldn't be buying up a ton of units and renting them out at a profit if there was a glut of inventory, because it would be a terrible investment.
Or, accounting and tax law makes it less painful to keep units vacant than reprice them at lower rents.
Which is a thing we could change via something like Vancouver's vacancy tax.
Make it more in landlords' interest to reprice units lower, if the market has excess inventory.
This meme has got to go: there is little if any evidence to suggest that markets are functioning either in the specific case of housing in high COL areas in the United States or frankly most times anyone trots out the Milton Friedman trope on HN.
Markets fail, they get captured, they get distorted by accounting treatments, they generate cartels. They get technologically disrupted by new forms of cartel pricing that blow past existing regulations(e.g. TFA).
Capitalism sounds dope, I hope I live to see it. But the idea that supply and demand in the Econ 101 formulation is anything to do with the lot of say a person renting a flat in 2024 is silly and borders on insulting.
A lot of native New Yorkers live with a lot of family members or roommates, and these are the types of people who are most likely the move out. Meanwhile, the most likely people to move into New York are well paid young professionals who can afford more space.
> In NYC I can tell you that the metropolitan area lost about 500,000 people since 2020, added ~20-30k housing units per year in that same time. The vacancy rate somehow dropped dramatically despite this and rents also rose dramatically. I've >yet to see any good explanation for this
Taking these numbers as given, the obvious explanation is latent demand. A lot of people who used to live five to a 900 sqft. New York apartment are now living 2 or 3 to an apartment instead. Probably the rent dipped briefly before soaring, yeah? People took advantage, and when leases are up, many of those people will presumably consolidate back with their families.
Very similar to the concept of "induced demand" (which is also really latent demand) with regards to highways. Build new lanes, people who were unwilling to drive before use the lanes, traffic delays stay the same (but with higher throughput, and therefore still a net positive, even if the money would've been better spent on trains).
Landlords are not keeping units off the market to drive up prices. There are no landlords who have the pricing power to make that work. There is no landlord that can keep 10% of his inventory off the market to drive up rental prices 11%.
There is, however, in any market a small number of big players, all politically connected, who will conspire against newcomers building new units. A couple years ago stories about that "historic laundromat" in SF were making the rounds, that is very typical.
There is a housing shortage.
That's it.
Fix it by building more housing.
Nothing else is gonna do anything.
Building more housing is not going to do anything. It is at most a temporary salve. Once people have housing they reproduce, creating more demand for housing. Building more housing is like building more roads: not a solution to anything, in fact, only encouraging the problem to get worse.
Building more housing now may in fact cause people to reproduce more, which will create more demand for housing... in 20 or 30 years. Well, in 20 or 30 years, we can build some more housing.
And even if we don't... solving the problem for 20 or 30 years is not nothing. It's worth doing.
That, and people who were born this century have no idea about the immensity of housing inflation.
In 2007, a 1-BR apartment in Hanover, NH was USD 750. With official inflation at 3 % that would be now something like USD 1325. Good luck finding anything below USD 2250 these days. That's 7 %, more than double headline inflation.
It's a complete policy failure, also because housing is about the most unproductive kind of investment there is.
Even if you fix all the zoning and land supply problems, you still need to qualify this as building the right kind of housing. Building more large, expensive homes that are gobbled up by investors or people 'parking' money isn't going to help people that need cheap dwellings to actually live in.
I'm not saying you're not aware of this or that your statement doesn't include the possibility, but (housing) developers will follow the money, and that doesn't mean making small affordable homes when the profit margins on other types of dwelling are higher.
> Building more large, expensive homes that are gobbled up by investors or people 'parking' money isn't going to help people that need cheap dwellings to actually live in.
Investors that gobbled up properties are renting them to renters (assuming it isn't on airbnb) to pay their holding costs (mortgage, tax, maintenance), since they are by definition investors. They actually increase the pool of property for renters, keeping rent price lower, which fights rental inflation. This does drive up purchase price for the home itself, but that's a separate topic.
Same with people parking money, why would they be leaving the homes empty when they could rent it out for additional cash flow?
That's the theory, and the practice is that there's a serious undersupply of entry-level housing. There's simply not enough housing of type 3 BR, up to 1500 sqft being built, and the existing stock is deteriorating.
People will say, yabbut, airplane hangar houses out on the bajada, but you cannot subdivide those monstrosities into apartments.
It's been demonstrated over and over again that building high end housing does have an impact on the prices of lower end stuff.
It is of course likely to have a greater impact to build lower cost stuff, but blocking a development because you don't like the sort of houses they want to build is more or less stupid (it's not like a developer is going to do a project there is no demand for, and that demand is probably already looking elsewhere near the proposed development...).
That’s not how it works. New housing, even if luxury, provides options for wealthier people to buy who otherwise are forced to bid up the price of older homes and remodel it to their liking. New housing starts an immediate chain reaction where wealthier people vacate older housing in less desired areas for the new homes, thus putting downward price pressure on older homes. Our current problem is that for the last thirty years we have banned most new construction, resulting in a shortage of new homes.
We saw this dynamic play out during the pandemic when news cars were delayed due to supply chain constraints, and the price of used cars shot up.
I should have prefixed my comment by saying I'm not in America. In the country I live in, population growth effectively occurs by immigration of not-poor migrants, and that growth continues to outstrip supply. Sure, if you build more high-end houses than you need, you would see the effect you describe, but it's like emptying a swimming pool with a straw.
I can’t speak to your unspecified country, but in America the effect on lower income housing occurs within three years:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00941...
The only reason we don’t see more of this effect is because zoning restricts most new construction. The straw in your analogy is zoning.
Maybe there should be an occupancy credit, like a clean energy credit. Empty property holders can buy it from occupied property holders to compensate for the higher property tax burden.
It’s not realpage causing inflation. Come on
Look, the first most important totally big thing is that at the beginning of covid governments around the world printed a boatload of cash and gave it out as furlough for waiters and nurses and construction workers. And that was a Good Thing. People could eat and pay rent. But that took a boatload of cash - US printed 10 trillion dollars - the UK a trillion. 27 European nations all did something similar - the Middle East. Noone knows how much but it’s tens of trillions - perhaps let’s say 50 trillion. With a T.
Then that money went to the landlords and the supermarkets and the. Went up to the supermarket shareholders and the owners of the office buildings and eventually the wealthy - those who can live without salary - they got almost all of it. And they have to spend that money on something - property, stocks, gold, land
It’s inflation because there is an extra fifty trillion floating around.
Real page is doing nothing amazing - collating price information and telling landlords “hey a flat like this is renting for 20% on the next street”. Well that’s because some part of that fifty trillion just got invested in a company that hired a guy who moved into the neighbourhood- it’s going to chnage the character of the neighbourhood and those who are unlucky get squeezed out the bottom and sleep in a park looking over the Golden Gate.
Look at any article in MMT. This is something we solve with 1. Taxation (equal tax treatments for capital gains etc) and 2. Sane social policies (education, health etc)
The DOJ is looking for a culprit who is breaking a system that otherwise would work - that’s the point of anti-cartel laws. Ut the system is broken - and it has a simple fix. Tax the rich - we did it for Russian Olivarchs, now spread the love
> Real page is doing nothing amazing - collating price information and telling landlords “hey a flat like this is renting for 20% on the next street”.
Not true and not what RealPage is being charged with.
What RealPage actually did was:
- Provide a suggested rent
- Set their default at "use suggested rent"
- Promise landlords that suggested rent would always increase
- Pressure landorders who rented under the suggested price
- Connect landlords, so they could talk about pricing> - Pressure landorders who rented under the suggested price
How did RealPage do this? I'm OOTL.
>> The complaints showed that it’s more than just information sharing; RealPage has “pricing advisors” that monitor landlords and encourage them to accept suggested pricing, it works to get employees at landlord companies fired who try to move rents lower, and it even threatens to drop clients who don’t accept its high price recommendations.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-the-r...
Yes, but so what. Modern city property rental Markets are open transparent competitive markets.
The idea that NYC was full of landlords who never looked at a listings page, had no idea how much similar apartments were going for, and have suddenly been transformed into rapacious greed monsters by a few phone calls from RealPage sales team is ridiculous.
Assets have gone up like SpaceX rockets since Covid - gold, stocks and of course property. And the top end of the market has the wealthy beneficiaries of that renting this nicest stuff, so the people who used to be there now move one rung down and price out that rung who move down and …
This is just a facet of systemic inflation - it’s not the actions of evil RealPage causing it. Sure they aren’t helping and may have broken laws - but FFS if market price information provision is now collusion Reuters and Bloomberg have got some lawyering up to do
There's a big difference between inefficient decentralized price fixing and efficient centralized price fixing, because once a centralized entity reaches critical penetration its pricing power increases drastically.
When there aren't enough defectors to move the market, they can be ignored.
> printed a boatload of cash and gave it out as furlough for waiters and nurses and construction workers … US printed 10 trillion dollars
Well, I don’t think 10 trillion was paid to waiters and nurses and construction workers, etc. I’m curious what that actual number was. I’d be surprised if it touched 1 trillion. Something like 250 billion sounds more plausible to me, but if anyone has a source that would be interesting.
10 trillion was added to the money supply, but I believe the vast majority of it went somewhere else and never passed through the sort of people you mention.
The money supply expansion did juice the stock market and avoided a recession on paper, while shifting real value from savers and earners over to asset holders. Working as intended, I suppose.
I think the biggest BS aspect of inflation is that wages are set in USD basically universally and are therefore subject to inflation.
You can choose to move your savings out of USD and into something more stable, but if you are a worker you can’t move your comp into anything else.
The second most BS part is being taxed on inflation whenever you sell assets. Even if the asset doesn’t have any real appreciation, you get to pay tax on whatever the government decided to inflate the currency by. Absolute nonsense.
I think we are in basic agreement
>>> while shifting real value from savers and earners over to asset holders. Working as intended, I suppose.
No furlough directly did not receive all of that but the “cost of covid” (the amount spent by government without taxing it back) was on that order. I wish I had a better line accounting of it.
But the basic effect is the same - the owners of assets - the wealthiest in society, get a greater proportion of the “tokens that allocate future resource allocation” (dollars) than previously - and this means they put that money somewhere - and we see that as inflation everywhere.
The solution as I see it is taxing the assets (not a “wealth tax” but more same approaches).
On taxing assets, I think money is used for too many different things.
If we are talking about people owning yachts or airplanes or fifth houses or whatever, then yes, tax the heck out of those.
However, assets with a dollar valuation are also how we assign control of economic functions, i.e. businesses. Control of an economic function is really, seriously qualitatively different than owning yachts or airplanes. Economic functions operating well or not so well has an enormous impact on the success or failure of a society.
Changing how we assign economic function control is very risky, since there is no way to simulate the outcome.
What do you think about that? Are you including share ownership in the asset tax? If so, do you think this will somehow not alter economic control?
An alternative might be to have a split currency that is not freely exchangeable, where one is for business control and one is for stuff. You can sell your business, hold the business currency for however long and then buy another business or part of a business. But if you want to convert the business currency to stuff currency, at that point you are taxed heavily.
I would be in favor of a separate currency class for land also, for the record.
(Not sure if this has some obvious fatal flaw, I am but an armchair economist.)
Never mind it's taboo to talk about how the pandemic made you wealthy. The divide is real, and I feel for the people who thought a $2000 stimulus check was a win. If only they knew about assets and broker margin.
According to the IMF [1]. The world GDP in 2020 was about 85T. I really would question such a high estimation for the printed money to be anything near 50T or even something high to these levels.
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/OEMDC/ADVE...
Good stats on this are hard to come by. I am happy to see better figures and happy to wind down from 50T. But the order of magnitude is on the money - if it’s 10T or 30 does it really matter? It’s an unprecedented increase in such a short time - inflation figures have barely caught up - we will be seeing inflation go through the roof for decades to come and central banks trying to use their only lever (interest rates) on something that is a fiscal problem.
So follow my more restrained calculations: statia below gives us a 3TN increase for covid period, UK gov figures have 800BN Sterling which is 1T USD give or take. Then look at 27 European countries - at 500M people spending at the rate of USA gives us 5T, before we even look at Japan and Asia. We have got over 10TN. That’s a boatload in anyone’s momey
US fed balance sheet increases by 3 TN 2020-24 https://www.statista.com/topics/6441/quantitative-easing-in-...
> This is something we solve with 1. Taxation (equal tax treatments for capital gains etc) and 2. Sane social policies (education, health etc)
Ah yup. First we print tens of trillions and go to unsustainable debt levels and then we explain that, now, we need to tax people.
Another solution would have been to maybe not print tens of trillions out of their arse?
I expect this thread is long dead but paying the money to get through covid was a Good Thing.
The issue is interesting in that afaik, covid caused a massive “pause” in the private economy - the government kept paying its workers as usual, and workers kept paying their rent and so on, but a huge chunk of the economy is discretionary - such as going out to the pub, or shopping for clothes or buying yachts.
And so the government did its best to keep pub workers furloughed and shop workers furloughed, and keep the supply chains turning over.
Which basically meant that the people with most discretion in spending (the rich) stopped spending but the money they would have spent was spent instead by the government- thus the government spent the money the rich would have and then the rich did not spend it.
This transfer of wealth from government to rich does need to be handled
To my knowledge, this has only ever been done successfully during ww2. The mechanism used was semi-forced lending via war bonds. The war bonds were predominantly purchased by wealthy individuals and the rate of return was lower than all alternatives.
The spending of war debt on the other hand went out to common individuals. As the war debt was never repaid, encumbants would spend the next 2 decades with lower rates of return compared to new market participants.
> As the war debt was never repaid
The war debt was, in fact, repaid.
> the cost of shelter accounts for 70% of all inflation for the last twelve months
Technically, this should read "70% of inflation in all items less food and energy". And since enrgy costs are actually down for the past year, this basically says that rent increases are the majority cause of inflation except maybe food, but that's not clear from the BLS data linked.
It's like there's a shortage of housing or something.
That's true in some markets, but the DOJ complaint highlights some places, like Atlanta, where vacancy rates have gone up, but rents have still climbed higher.
Why would you need to collude for higher rents with RealPage if a shortage of housing was the primary driver of rent increases?
If someone's being that greedy, they can't really use supply and demand to say their hands were tied in terms of controlling rent.
If you have the option to extract rents by forming a cartel (without legal punishment), you'll do it regardless of the underlying value of the asset you're trying to control because it's free money (assuming you can trust the other members of the cartel)
Rent is 36.1% of the CPI basket - so if inflation was distributed evenly - you'd expect 36.1% of the increase to come from rent / housing.
70% is really not that shocking. Rents only need to increase a little bit more than average with most other things increasing a little bit less than average to end up at 70%.
Vehicles and energy make up almost 14% of the basket - and those are negative.
The problem I have with this analysis is that it's tying RealPage to the politicized perception of rent inflation --- i.e., when the news cycles about it began. But affordability has been a crisis for something approaching a decade now, far precedes RealPage, and impacts places RealPage doesn't operate.
There's a subtext in this article that you have to follow Stoller to know about, which is whether he's aligning himself with the NIMBY opposition to the YIMBY movement, so I expect him to take some flak for these arguments, whether or not RealPage is a proximate cause of higher rents (I have no reason to disbelieve him on that point; by all means burn it to the ground).
Also: Up to 30% of app pricing is due to price-fixing.
We (including the companies cannibalizing their own ecosystems for profit) would all be better off with a refresh of competition enhancing laws that (a) decrease barriers to entry & (b) apply increasing competitive restrictions as market share and absolute company size grow.
You could say the same about prices in general increasing due to credit card fees ($.30 per transaction + 3%).
I wonder if addressing price fixing in rent prices will ease the regulations around short-term rentals (which have shown to also increase rents by about 3%).
I wonder if we will ever reach a point where implementing a land value tax will be politically feasible. All other solutions look like bandaids to me.
There are very few jobs that provides as little value as being a landlord. Imagine all of them dying tomorrow, what happens? People just keep on living as usual, maybe they'll have to clean their own drain and paint their poorly maintained (ex)rental unit...
Its the upscale equivalent of ticket or GPU scalping (the practice of buying up all material and simply only upselling it for more money).
Parasites of the system.
The world has a lot of buildings. Buildings are valuable. Every building you see, unless it's been abandoned, is owned by someone or some entity that's responsible for acquiring, protecting, and maintaining it. Some do a better job than others.
Not that landlords do construction work themselves - that's a different industry. But someone has to arrange financing. Many renters are not trusted by banks enough to get a mortgage, often for good reasons. They still need a place to live, though.
Someone has to try to prevent people from damaging the buildings and repair them when they are damaged. Maybe that's the super, but someone has to hire them. The people who damage buildings are often pretty nasty.
In theory, the state could do this. In some countries, the state does a lot of it. But someone has to do it. It's an essential job, and if not a landlord, there will be a manager that does pretty much the same thing.
Just about everything can be outsourced, but it adds overhead. The labor doesn't go away, it just gets moved around.
Not everyone is ready and willing to be responsible for a building.
Yes, because it's trying to make your business as legally necessary as a tax. It's to do with regulation, not renting things.
That seems like an easy, reflexive way to ride current wave of discontent over housing prices. I am not suggesting that landlords are not entirely blameless in the equation, but suggesting they add no value at all is shortsighted.
Not to mention the obvious, the new owner would become the new landlord and the process would start all over.
I have to tell you though. This weird attitude makes me hesitate on my next move. My family unit was discussing keeping current house ( and likely rent ) and moving into something further away. I will admit that this anti-landlord sentiment makes consider just straight sale to the highest bidder.
Like.. I have a married friend, whose dad is an actual landlord asshole ( and he was confronted over that ), but not everyone is an asshole despite what some recent actions by humans may suggest.
You can say similar things about shareholders or anyone else who allocates capital.
Calling landlords parasites is like blaming tech employees for gentrification. You're missing the bigger picture.
> Imagine all of them dying tomorrow, what happens?
The majority of landlords in the US (at least in the small scale - not sure about big complexes) do not own the property outright. They have a loan (e.g. mortgage) just like anyone else.
So what will happen? The banks will become the new owners. And they'll sell it at a discount to someone else (with a loan, of course).
I know it's easy to complain about landlords, but if you suddenly kill all landlords and ban landlording, you'll get a lot more homeless people.
I guess in this hypothetical, imagine all ownership of the rental units suddenly transferred to the tenant. Would the net effect to the economy be positive or negative?
The construction industry would collapse as buying confidence would disappear. Buildings with large amounts of renters would likely fall into disarray over the long term.
I mean, you'd eliminate the rental market entirely, meaning that the only way to live anywhere is to buy.
That would be utterly disastrous. Homelessness would skyrocket. I mean, where are people who can't afford a down payment going to live?
Also, a lot of people don't want to buy, even if they can. If you know you're going to live in a city for a two-year employment contract before moving again, you want to rent.
Although I agree with the sentiment, is there a quantifiable way to demonstrate this? For instance, do people who declare their occupation as landlord have some demonstrable income distribution x std deviations above some control group?
I'd imagine they do but I try hard to not just imagine data matches my priors. (Yes, this almost always makes me unpopular)
> For instance, do people who declare their occupation as landlord have some demonstrable income distribution x std deviations above some control group?
Not really. Being a landlord takes a bunch of money to sink into the real estate assets. If you don't put it in there you'd just leave it in a mutual fund or whatever and be making passive income of about the same order. Real Estate is a solid investment choice but it's not *that* much better.
Basically this argument is for the form "being a landlord looks like a working class job but pays better and that's not fair".
But the actual truth on the ground is "being a landlord is just a different way of being wealthy, and you have to fix plumbing on the side instead of working a day job in an office".
Sorry to press but do you have evidence?
Maybe the number of bankruptcies of landlords versus other professions normalized for age (since many bankruptcies are health related and landlords tend to be older).
Is there some hard data somewhere that can be scrutinized rather than narratives and sentiment?
(see I told you I'm unpopular)
So, you get to work a part time job while being richer than most working full time jobs. Not a bad gig, but it doesn't feel very fair to wage workers.
They can be parasites even without being richer.
Merely the fact that a typical landlord works far fewer hours than most other careers. Even a property portfolio of 100 properties probably isn't a full time job if you have managing agents.
This is nonsense. The vast majority of landlords have to work a day job in order to finance the property in the first place.
In a rent-controlled area like in parts of Canada, it's not unusual for the tenant to improve the apartment they are renting with the consent of the landlord. This is ultimately to the tenants' benefit. Imagine investing $1200 into new flooring. Spread over 3/4 years of rent controlled rent, it comes out to $25 a month.
It's a problem whether the occupier is a renter or homeowner. The landlord is, in my experience, just going to call a handyman anyway. May as well cut out the middleman as thats something I can do myself.
The modern way is to have a handyman (just like you have a gardner or cleaner). The handyman has a list of gutters to empty, squeaky hinges to oil, HVAC filters to clean, etc.
Keep adding these small tasks to the list, and when the list gets long or something urgent comes up, call the handyman out for a half-day.
Funny the same people that say stuff like this say that the person who can't even clean their own drain should plan their own retirement using a 401K as the vehicle and if they fail at it and starve well that's their fault, there's no way we could have seen it not working out.
I tell you even worse group. Stock owners. Those people put some money to fancy ETF or investment fund. They do absolutely zero work and some how expect that money to appreciate or even give out dividends. While the poor workers of these companies get pittance or sub-standard wages with which they can barely afford nothing. And then those same companies exploit their customers while always pumping up the prices and extracting maximal margins...
Really if these people just died and the companies moved to their workers or customers what would change?
Landlords provide one thing capital. And capital expects returns. Maybe at times there is not enough competition in where capital is spend, but in general it is not that great place to put capital.
As if landlords clean the drains, provide a decent paint job.
Maybe in an apartment, a maintenance person might; but smaller rentals; at most the landlord charges the tenant and calls a plumber;
in reality the tenant is often responsible for calling and paying the plumber;
At worst, the landlord has never had the plumbing cleaned or inspected, the tenant or landlord hires a plumber, the plumber finds an object stuck at the tree roots in the pipe, and the landlord charges the tenant for the whole job, threatens the security deposit, and when the tenant refuses to pay, the landlord evicts them.
Say tomorrow we outlawed being a landlord. Every multi-family and apartment unit would be demolished and turned into SFH, or sold off as condos.
And everyone would have to live with parents or friends until they could afford a down payment. That sounds like a worse world than the one we live in.
What would probably happen is following. It depends on many things, but assuming it is done near instantly and there aren't side effects.
For some time house values would drop, they will be sold to largest possible buyers. This isn't small buyers but probably banks, since they have lots of capital. Because of price drops, demand will be lessened and house construction industry will experience layoffs.
Many people will be without a house to rent, so banks or large money interests will offer their stockpile of houses under strict terms i.e. rent without renting (timeshare/leasing/house borrowing).
You'll get landlords but with deeper pockets.
Why wouldn't they just convert to owner-occupied apartments?
There's an argument to be made about affordability, but there are a lot of arguments against paying someone else, for which you receive no equity, and they get to keep any price appreciation of the property.
It'd be interesting to see a rental market that banned anything but rent-to-own contracts, where some portion of your monthly rent had to buy equity in the property you occupy. (With standardized terms for disposal, sale, etc)
I've always heard owner occupied apartments called condos. Is there a difference I'm not aware of?
You're paying the landlord for the cost of capital and the property management. And a 400k house in the stock market would on average generate 40k a year in appreciation. Most apartments in functional markets aren't anywhere near that appreciative.
Why would they be demolished(a debit) when they could be sold(a credit)? 34% of people live in rental housing. If those units flooded the market, it'd be much easier to save up to buy while living with parents or friends.
If everyone's saving up to buy then the prices will go up. This is a demand problem, not a landlord problem. Too much demand vs supply makes prices go up. Far, far too much demand vs supply means landlords step in and invest, and divide properties into smaller pieces to rebalance supply to demand, or as much as is in each one's power.
I thought that if people didn't buy something then supply would go up and the price would decrease. That's what I learned in econ 101 at least
It's really hard to get a mortgage for multiple people that aren't married.
Basically if you and 3 friends want to buy a 4-plex for 400k you would assume the bank would just make sure each person could afford 100k, they don't. Instead the bank will ensure each person individually has sufficient financial resources to afford a 400k home.
That and converting a 4 plex into condos doesn't make financial sense when you could just demolish it and build townhomes.
But 31% of rentals are SFRs. Surely that's enough to make an impact, no?
> Say tomorrow we outlawed being a landlord. Every multi-family and apartment unit would be demolished and turned into SFH, or sold off as condos.
> And everyone would have to live with parents or friends until they could afford a down payment. That sounds like a worse world than the one we live in.
You are using a logical fallacy known as false dichotomy. We have many other possibilities such as commie blocks and even denser privately owned residential housing with fair competition and pricing. Maybe hard to achieve fair pricing but not impossible.
You'd have to outline how the current system isn't fair, or even what fair is.
> From 2020-2024, rent prices spiked by a third. How much of that is due to collusion by corporate landlords and a software coordinator?
> And where is the Fed?
Printing shitload of money. Which accounts for the other 75%.
The middle case is that we are paying 2.6% higher rent due to RealPage.
I don't think the aggressive piece is realistic. And if we break up RealPage I highly doubt we'll see an significant drop in rent prices.
An interesting analysis would be looking at vacancy rate across different cities over time. If we saw a large increase in cities with a high penetration of RealPage I'd be more inclined to believe it's having a significant impact.
For California and Text at least it looks like the price increase is classical supply and demand driven. We're not building enough multifamily or apartments. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TXRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CARVAC