Comment by lifeisstillgood
Comment by lifeisstillgood 7 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
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.