Comment by firejake308 10 months ago
> 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.
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.
It's like there's a shortage of housing or something.