Comment by JamesBarney
Comment by JamesBarney 8 hours ago
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
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.