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What about when market prices are public? Is knowing the market prices collusion?

Is there an actual issue? I've seen compelling arguments that places that banned the practice of algorithmic rent setting did not see any appreciable drop in rents. I'm almost convinced the problem is entirely supply side.

They got a wrist slap because the case was flimsy and probably wouldn't stand up in court. This looks nothing like price fixing and everything like price discovery in an undersupplied market, and the people bringing the case are the same government responsible for the actual problem.

Is this not almost exactly what you get on apartments.com or zillow.com by just looking at the listed prices in an area?

I think you might have the problem backwards. Realpage was about buyer collusion, and that wouldn't look any different from the prices naturally just rising in a market with more demand/less supply because even sellers who aren't colluding would still raise their prices if they saw that that was the going rate in the area.

When there are multiple competing factors all influencing price simultaneously it's very hard to accurately determine how much any particular factor contributed, or what the "actual price" would have been without them.

This is actually essentially the problem that justifies markets as an efficient way to arrive at fair prices - it's computationally too expensive to calculate the precise supply/demand ratios at any given moment, and demand can change much faster than supply can adjust (and nobody could ever really know how elastic demand is for things like local housing markets anyway).

So sellers want to respond to changes in demand by raising prices, because the business model of housing rentals is matching short term demand/pricing/risk to long term costs/costs/risk. But every buyer has their own demand preferences and every supplier has a different product with different fixed costs, and everybody knows their own demand preference and ability to provide supply, so the aggregate price a market settles at "collapses" all that information without explicit coordination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

If there truly is an increase in demand, as a buyer you probably do want rents to increase, because otherwise you get shortages like in Berlin where there is nothing to rent. So that's why coordinating to withold inventory with other sellers is bad, it creates a shortage anyway and only a small number of participants need to do it to move the entire market

How it works in Victoria, Australia is for renewing an existing lease is you must provide examples of comparable rentals in the area at or above the price you are proposing. And the tenant can dispute with their own comparable if they believe the price is wrong. New listings can be listed at any price.

There is enough turnover with new listings to find the market rate while preventing existing tenants from being screwed over by unreasonable prices.

Australia also almost entirely works off rentals owned by individuals who own 1-3 properties rather than corporate owners so no one landlord has any sway over the market.

A growing body of economic research shows that this allows producers to keep prices high even with lots of competition.

Should rentals be seen as economic opportunities for hyper efficiencies? IE should the market be structured to extract the maximum profit from renters?

Not clear to me that is the right approach, or if owning rentals should be more of a fixed income approach (or even speculative - profits only come from the sale of the property).

We have that in my city. Works great. If your city doesn't have one you don't have to wait for an official one. You can crowdsource rent data.

Al la dc rent registry, which I always thought was ironic because doesn’t this create a database where landlords can consider prices based on others… but I guess it would be public in this case.

https://rentregistry.dc.gov/

I don’t see why rental agreements can’t be registered with the county like house sales are. It would also eliminate the need for squatter laws, as it would be trivial for police to pull up the county website and see who belongs in the home.

The fact that the number of houses owned by large corporations is so low as to be insignificant shows that it’s basically 0% of the cause. (I’m assuming you’re not against a landlord who owns a small number of properties forming an LLC, but mean companies that rent lots of properties.)

It is a supply issue caused by local building codes and zoning. Full stop. Everything else is just pretending to do something about the problem, and corporations are just scapegoats.

You have over-simplified "ownership" into a thing that doesn't exist. Most Americans "own" their house in a complicated relationship between themselves, individually or jointly or as a family trust, and one of several monstrous global financial firms, each of which holds part of the interest.

It would dramatically reduce the availability of rental properties. So, if you really hate renters, it’s a good thing I guess.

Extremely low chance that I’m going to put my entire net worth on the line to own and rent out housing in my own name.

Exactly zero chance that I’ll do it in a multi-family or apartment building.

Holding these things in corporate title is sensible risk management and compartmentalization.

I filed my claim, and based on their calculator this might be the most serious check from a class action (assuming I get the full amount). For me its ~1.5k between 3 named landlords.

I had a plumber over to quote a HVAC replacement, while he was working up the quote I saw his iPad where his was inputting the equipment for costs etc, then it flipped over to an area that showed my home estimated value, my estimated household income and a ton of other economic measures that gave them sweet spots for their quote. While I obviously know people do this, to see it so blatantly laid out (it wasn’t meant for my eyes) was very gross.

By the way, the home value and income estimates were higher than reality, and his quote was also fairly high - though not the highest

I really can't think of any others. Which is why RealPage has been so newsworthy.

If you have examples of such a company in other industries, please share.

Could you give us other examples?

Even without outright collusion, a market without at least seven viable suppliers is not really competitive. Current "monopoly" policy is corrupt.

(Seven has been experimentally determined, but I can't recall where.)

>> Businesses should be required to compete and to opeerate in competitive markets.

I'm not sure I understand where you are going with this? Are you suggesting that a new product cannot enter a market without a number of simultaneous competitors?

If I want to roll out fibre to an area that doesn't have it, can I? If I want to build a fresh-produce store in a town that doesn't have one, then I need to find someone else to compete with?

Lots and lots of businesses operate as quasi-monopolies if you look hard enough. Especially in smaller and rural environments. Lots and lots of places have one gas station, one mechanic, one vet, one doctor, one diner and so on.

Your use of the word "require" seems difficult to implement. What if no-one wants to compete with me? If Apple stops making Macs, does MS have to stop making Windows?

I am seeing a funny skit where the city is busting some bougie coop for having way too high of prices.

It is not just housing but all land - the grocery store ups prices without increasing profit because every landowner in the supply chain (who they rent their stores from, their warehouses, the factories that process and package foods, the farms themselves) ups rent too.

This is a predictable outcome of commerce due to the limited supply of land and is described in some detail by Adam Smith and developed by later thinkers like Riccardo and George (who took it to its logical conclusion and inspired the board game Monopoly).

During the 20th century, economics was wholesale rewritten to blur the lines between land and capital so as to bury this awkward conversation.

The general recommendation of these early economists was taxing land - moderate in the case of Smith, up to 100% per George. This amounts to public ownership of part of the profits of land ownership.

... and the term for this behavior gives it away: "rent-seeking".

> It's both funny and sad to see the mental gymnastics of people trying to find solutions to this when the solution is real simple: it's public ownership.

No, it is not. Communism tried that and all communist countries failed spectacularly. Public ownership in practice means that everyone has rights but zero responsibilities.

Taking people's private property is not a solution to any crisis. This whole housing thing looks like "I want to have my cake and eat it too".