Comment by bagels
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.
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.
> 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.
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.