Comment by ethbr1

Comment by ethbr1 7 hours ago

> 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

a_wild_dandan 6 hours ago

> - Pressure landorders who rented under the suggested price

How did RealPage do this? I'm OOTL.

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ethbr1 6 hours ago

>> 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...

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bagels 6 hours ago

My understanding of what's alleged: Landlords have incentive to join because they can collude with other landlords to get higher prices. If they don't participate in the price fixing, they lose access to the platform.

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- Aunche 6 hours ago
  
  I have a really hard time believing these allegations because that would mean that they're actively trying to push away paying customers, which neither helps Realpage nor the alledged cartel. Everything I've read about this has been suspiciously vague. What it sounds like they're doing is punishing property managers from deviating from the pricing algorithm rather than the property companies themselves.
  
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  GauntletWizard 4 hours ago
  
  > actively trying to push away paying customers
  This is making the assumption that there's pushback against their "advice". People are stupid, greedy, and corrupt. Realpage only needed to make promises, promises that it could only keep if most of their customers followed suit, to get most (the vast, vast majority) of their customers to follow suit.
  Their customers aren't mom and pop landlords with a second property; THey're not even full-time landlords with a dozen units that pay the bills. They're giant property investment companies, They "only" own a quarter of the units between them, but that's enough to shift the needle. They're very heirarchical, and if the upper management says "Use this pricing model", they'll just fire you if you don't. There are no exceptions, there's no leeway; They have internal apps for building the contracts and their "property managers" literally can't go outside of them.
  
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lifeisstillgood 6 hours ago

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

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ethbr1 6 hours ago

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.

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