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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

Right, it seems like this only works if they conspire or if there are large property holders. Maybe it’s the latter? If I own two houses and left one empty it certainly wouldn’t change the total supply enough to comeback out ahead.

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Or, this doesn't work. Such a conspiracy would easily be covered by anti-monopoly laws in the US, I'm sure that there would be some equivalent law in Spain.

The real reason buildings would stay vacant is either ownership attempting to charge above market for rent, or land speculators who are looking to hold and flip, without developing it enough so it can be used in the meantime.

How strictly and often are those laws enforced? I don't think anyone is suggesting that they gather together in a back-alley kitchen to talk shop with the Joker. Rather, it's not unreasonable to think that many of the people involved in an area's real estate market are connected, socially, and share their independent strategies in the course of socializing.

I doubt property ownership is concentrated enough for this to be possible. Tacit collusion can work with a duopoly but by the time you get to five participants in a market it doesn’t work unless cartel agreements are legally enforceable and I doubt there are less than 5,000 residential property owners in Barcelona.

I think you're missing the point. It's not collusion, it's simple socialization. But it's inherent in the station of being a property owner to want to extract as much out of one's property as possible, and through this simple socializing, ideas about what most effectively achieves that aim can spread through the networks of interested parties while largely remaining inside of them.

There doesn't have to be a "conspiracy" when the incentives of several powerful institutions with a lot of real estate property (banks, Church, big families with relatives in the Town Hall, regional and national parliament) align like that.

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