Rent going up? One company’s algorithm could be why
propublica.org
propublica.org
The consultants come in, recommend you fire 10% of your workforce, and when you pull the trigger you say, sorry McKinsey made me do it! Likewise, the recommendations made by the software are non-binding, but if pushed you say “well the algorithm said so…”
In either case, it’s the c-suite/property manager making the call. But it seems that we like a measure of distance between ourselves and unpleasant decisions. The algorithm/well-groomed 20-somethings provide a kind of plausible deniability.
The answer is, of course, a ton more housing.
The ones you want to fire will still be there.
No no, you do it quietly and based on numbers. "Likes" is too subjective and will lead to discrimination lawsuits. Start with highest salary, easiest to replace, and/or middle management.
On the other hand, if the system recommends keeping units vacant, that does start to suggest that it is enabling landowners to take advantage of monopolistic pricing power. Yet higher vacancy rates could actually be socially optimal as well. A similar phenomena occurs in the movie theater business. Theater owners often price tickets such that the "vacancy" rates (empty seats) are quite high. However, a law that required pricing tickets low enough to fill all seats would reduce the return on equity in the industry so much that investment in the theater industry would plummet, vastly reducing the number of theater seats available available to fill consumer demand in the medium to long term.
Lo and behold:
“To arrive at a recommended rent, the software deploys an algorithm — a set of mathematical rules — to analyze a trove of data RealPage gathers from clients, including private information on what nearby competitors charge.”
Dark times if the FTC isn’t picking this up.
While there are anti-competitive concerns with this kind of system, one of the points I was trying to make is that a problem requires more than there be simply a 'feedback loop'.
Even in a market with 'perfect' competition, there can be feedback loops: e.g., an individual farmer might price their grain by checking the current market price which is tracked by a third party, and that third party determines the 'current market price' by querying the prices set by all farmers. The reason this isn't necessarily anti-competitive and can be compatible with 'perfect' competition is due to the other characteristics of the market (all participants are price takers, etc), not due to a lack of coordination between producing firms and market analytics firms.
In my part of the world rents are often very naively indexed, say with CPI or CPI+. That is currently an issue, but usually pretty well functioning. Any individual has no influence on the CPI. So the CPI has a feedback loop, but no characteristic of influence.
In an AI world that characteristic of influence is indeed not clear at first. I can only expect this to be a pretty dark AI considering the 'Great Succes' it is for the owners. I expect it to vacuum data from brokers in order to calculate a "willingness to pay" combined with a "propensity to pay" to calculate individual and portfolio optimal increases.
How is this (/ could this be) collusion? Because the rent increase on property X1, owner Y1 (that is private information, at least I presume for the US rental contracts are 1-on-1 and not public information) is input for all the distributions over properties X and owners Y.
I think your point that other market characteristics have a large impact on collusion (yes / no / degree) is subtle as well.
This sounds like a nonsensical economic argument. Do you have a mathematical model that supports this argument?
It's up to the landlord to negotiate based on his individual situation (condition of the unit, demographics, furniture, etc)
Not different from a company asking for "market data" regarding salaries and use that to _guide_ their salary offers to new candidates
In the end the company will adjust their recommendation based on results/feedback from candidates (some companies could be popular/well liked and get away with lower compensation, and vice versa)
You can only outbid someone if you have more money than them. The lower on the income scale you are, the less this is an option, until it just stops bring an option at all!
Not to mention, it is drastically unfair and inhumane to consign people to live in the streets simply because they are poor, or simply poorer than the next. Rent control gives a measure of dignity to the poor, and ensures that -- at least a little bit -- when times get hard, we all suffer, the rich renters and the landlords too, not just the poor renters.
Until you have to actually pay the rent you bid.
> if supply doesn’t match demand, you just go homeless
This is true in both situations. Only in the second case instead of whatever rich asshole wants to move there getting the rental, the people who have lived there for decades already do.
Now take those decisions en masse: you want a city with a healthy economy, but the city is now stuck since it’s labor resources become illiquid along with its rental market. Now, some people want that, but HN readers (I think?) will be biased towards vibrancy.
At the time, I didn't see the harm in allowing it, since I didn't see a situation where this could be used against me.
After reading this article, I froze my data. I believe landlords should price rentals based on the value of their property, not the value of its tenants.
I've personally opted out entirely, instead of just going for the freeze. (In their terminology, a "freeze" lets them keep all your data and continue harvesting new data, whereas an "opt out" instructs them to delete all your data entirely.)
Another important detail: At my company (and presumably many others), it's not just your base salary that's sent over to The Work Number. It's also full details about your equity comp.
I've grudgingly disclosed my base salary as needed (leasing applications, etc), and it's easy enough to do without involving The Work Number because most employers are fine with generating an employment-verification letter. But I don't see any reason why the average landlord would need to know about my equity package, so I found that bit especially unsettling.
What she really means, is she would have never imagined sucking every penny out of you, until she got a hold of their software. They get filthy rich, while you need a place to live, and they generate excess profits on false supply and demand models.
Where I live, we have 60% occupancy, but the area is priced beyond anything reasonable. $2500 a month for a studio is nuts. Now we're getting a renters tax from the city. Joy.
Now, with the metro in an acute housing crunch, rents have gone up enough that investors are finally building more housing along the light rail line. What are they building? Small, chic apartments geared towards young people. It's not really the sort of thing that fosters strong communities, as anyone who wants to start a family is unlikely to stay there long term.
There's really only two outcomes I see: housing prices stabilize at marginally affordable at best, or the "character" they are trying to go for disappears not long after the housing bubble pops, and the area becomes blighted.
All of this is to say that there are market-driven price floors on housing that aren't easy to shift. The "just build housing" mantra might be over-estimating the extent to which people are willing to accept prices going down. There's better ways to make money elsewhere for the people you expect to do the building and management after a certain point.
Housing prices will always be a bubble, as long as they're so detached and distant from the communities they're trying to build.
Seattle traffic is so horrendous it does legitimately save time (or, if not saving time, take a consistent amount of time.)
Most of the other lines that I know of are similar or slightly better, but there's a bit of a spread. I don't know of any that are actually faster.
This is a metro that wishes it was a coastal style metro, but is not on the west or northeast coasts.
Some trips are much faster. The Capitol Hill extension was wildly popular, because pre-opening the surface traffic could easily take 20-40 minutes from Capitol Hill to either downtown or UW. Now, it's five minutes to either, and the surface traffic has also adjusted accordingly somewhat since less people are congesting the roads with cars and rideshares.
In general the highway network in the area is super fragile because there are only 4 major highways in the area (I-5, 520, I-405, I-90) and few parallel arterials. I suspect that East Link will also become wildly popular, as will the northern and southern extensions, because of predictable travel times. Already many people take the buses that get stuck in traffic that these light rail lines will replace. And it will also help alleviate the issues with the commuter buses, such as there not being enough bus drivers to operate the scheduled services.
The light rail isn't perfect, but few things are. Modern metro construction in the US has mostly gone sideways worse than light rail systems.
We have same issue in my city. New apartments are 40-50sqm 2 rooms (1 bedroom + kitchen-living room) or 60-70sqm 3 rooms (2 bedrooms + kitchen-living room ) at best. If you want family-sized housing, house in suburbia is pretty much the only option.
Sadly many apartments are not built to withstand a screaming child in a neighboring unit.
When the children are older those things don’t matter quite as much, but by that time people often can afford to move to more space.
The bigger the landlord is, the harder it could be, but for single family homes, if you're renting and want to add a deck and are willing to pay, talk to your landlord. There are risks (landlord evicts you right after you build it, etc) but those can be mitigated.
And if there are no sound-dampening apartments available in a particular area and price range, then the apartments you're trying to rent out not having them isn't a competitive disadvantage, so why bother?
Now city government acts surprised why developers build so nice tiny apartments, yet suburbia is growing at fast pace. Who could think that if you give out permits for mostly tiny apartments in gigantic apartment blocks, people will find other ways and try to fix the problem in rather anarchistic ways.
I lived in one of those at one point in the Seattle area and there were families (mostly with small children) in them.
We are building a smaller apartment building in Dallas and everything from unit numbers, to sizes and shape of building is driven by the zoning rules. And because the land is sold based on those rules you can’t really make it different otherwise the project isn’t viable anymore. Thats why everyone is currently building townhomes and not small apartments buildings in places like Old East Dallas or Bishop Arts District.
Supposedly, the owners of empty properties would rather "charge" a zillion dollars for their "luxury condos" and never actually profit from their property in any way, than ever allow the "value" to go down.
It's a baffling mentality. Housing alone is thought to fly free of supply and demand.
[0] https://www.corelogic.com/intelligence/the-role-of-rent-in-i...
The rest is the Law of Supply & Demand.
You’re mixing up fiscal and monetary policy. Congress and the Fed.
Increased profits gaming the public impression of inflation play a huge role. See the FRED chart above. Profits increased 1 trillion since 2020, thats something like 3300 dollars per capita.
If we’ve had inflation of 15% over the last two years then a 15% increase in nominal profits is a 0% increase in real profits?
2. Fed raises rates in response.
3. Mortgages get more expensive.
4. Rents, which compete with mortgages, get more expensive. They are also part of core inflation.
5. GOTO 1.
I left out the "break" involving massive unemployment and political unrest.
But the underlying problem here is the supply & demand! Rentals are competitive, an algorithm can't force people to pay more than an comparable rental property is charging.
It's the lack of housing supply in areas like SF is responsible for rents being a multiple of what they could be.
Developers want to build apartments, but are prevented from doing so by local regulations. So we need to change those regulations or, as is increasingly happening in the last couple of California's legislative sessions, take control away from local authorities (e.g. SF Board of Supervisors).
So maybe not everyone who wants to live there gets to.
Again, not from out that familiar with the area so maybe I’m off the mark here.
So instead of SF continuing to expand to engulf all of California, other cities in other areas would begin to grow. Somewhat this has happened - Redmond near Seattle, etc, but we haven't really had any "ground up" new cities that I can recall, they're all offshoots/suburbs of existing ones.
There's an analogy in the article to airplane seat pricing. The solution there was to tell the airlines they couldn't collude with each other, not to say "The real problem is the lack of flight supply."
But I don't see any actual evidence that collusion is happening. Collusion is difficult to pull off! It requires each owner to restrict their supply so that all owners benefit through higher prices. The incentive for an individual owner is to "defect" by renting out their whole supply. Collusion generally requires participants to be able to monitor and enforce each other's behavior.
To the extent that owners are increasing prices slightly to benefit themselves, that's not collusion, that's just the market clearing.
How long will looser regulations help until we're back to the same problem?
Perhaps we should dig deeper.
Why have we organized our society in a way that encourages and almost enforces high population density?
The fact is that our current way of living is unsustainable. The housing situation is just one symptom of that.
Unless your proposed plan is like living off grid or something, making it easy for people to move to cities seems logical.
Once you account for maintenance items owning becomes decently more expensive than a simple “mortgage + utilities + insurance + taxes” calculation shows. A $10k furnace every 25 years adds something like $40 a month and that’s only one of the many wear items there are.
There are other non-tangible benefits to ownership, of course.
Right, but remember that if you are a renter, the landlord is passing those $40 to you bundled in the rent (along with all other future maintenance projections). There's no free ride, the renter is paying for all of it plus profit margin to the landlord.
You can sometimes get lucky as a renter by finding a small-time incompetent landlord who doesn't price these future maintanence costs into the rent, but that's not the norm.
If an investment house was a business, it often takes a decade to see substantial returns, sometimes after many years of hard slog and even losses. Would you accept that from the businesses that hacker news dreams of?
I think the fundamental issue is that the whole renting market is buying long and selling short (buy a dwelling for a long period, rent it for short periods) and that causes issues on one or another direction (either you rent for what appears "too much" because you need to build reserves, or you rent for what appears "fair" and the first major expense kills the landlord).
Answering your question with another question. Why stop there? What you are ultimately arguing for is population-growth control. Turns out very few people are interested in the government deciding how many children they can have.
What do you mean here, and how does it relate to total population levels?
The ridiculously low cost of holding assets are making it too cheap to hold and do nothing. Tax policy is a big part of this, but won’t change for many years.
All this is doing is bringing it to smaller apartments and single family rentals.
I still feel that if you correctly account for costs and back out appreciation, being a single family home landlord ain’t worth it.
If you rent it out, there will be wear and tear (ie. after 5 years it'll need a full refurb), and you run the risk of having tenants stuck in your property if laws change and suddenly you aren't allowed to evict them.
Often the capital appreciation is so much greater in value than the rental income (after management, maintenance, etc) that it isn't worth risking the capital income for a tiny bit of rental income.
In other words, building more properties isn't the main problem here.
Cashflow is the lifeblood of a business. The era of cheap money is over. If a company wants to sit on their real estate while other companies are building and filling up their units, they can do so at their own peril. If you haven't noticed with the markets' movements, unrealized gains aren't worth anything.
The issue here is that there are units being held as vacant for long periods of time, in a saturated market, to drive prices up, and a central algorithm is being used by a large percentage of the market, that allows them to do this in a coordinated manner.
This is effectively textbook collusion, obfuscated by technology. People should be losing their real estate licenses over this, and honestly, folks should be reporting any company using this service to the real estate commission in their state for collusion, because this is normally something real estate commissions take seriously.
Can you define the "long period" or point somewhere in the article or other source where this is described?
>This is effectively textbook collusion, obfuscated by technology.
I probably did not read the same text books you read. Do the house sellers who hire the same appraiser also collude in your text book? What about people who use Zillow's or Redfin estimates?
> Can you define the "long period" or point somewhere in the article or other source where this is described?
The article mentions that landlords are using the software to run at lower occupancy rates to increase revenue. One specific landlord was mentioning an occupancy rate as low as 95% on 50,000 units (which is quite low). Landlords don't base occupancy rates on short-term vacancies.
> I probably did not read the same text books you read.
The article describes a service that takes private pricing data from numerous competitors, then gives all the competitors pricing and occupancy recommendations as a means of maximizing revenue. There's a good quote in the article about replacing the word algorithm, with a "guy named Bob". If a person was doing this, it would obviously be collusion, because it's a practice that is already illegal, essentially everywhere.
In real estate school, they were pretty explicit about not even walking the edges of collusion; for instance, simply saying "we only price our commissions at 3%" in a room with other brokers could be considered collusion.
> Do the house sellers who hire the same appraiser also collude in your text book? What about people who use Zillow's or Redfin estimates?
An appraiser sets prices based on factors like recent sales in the neighborhood of similar properties and property sizes, age/condition of the house, etc. Everyone can use the same appraiser because that appraiser isn't doing any coordination across the sellers. Two different appraisers, for the most point, should be setting very similar prices.
It could very well be collusion is every broker was using Zillow or Redfins estimate's, especially if they were giving recommendations on holding properties off the market in a coordinated way to maximize profits.
This product is being used to maximize revenue in specific markets, by telling landlords to hold apartments vacant by listing them at higher than market prices. By doing that across the market, they artificially increase scarcity, which forces people to rent those apartments at inflated prices. That's collusion by proxy, because you have a single actor that's coordinating actions.
It's collusion because all of these companies are sharing their private pricing data with a central entity, who's using that private data to provide coordinated actions.
> By doing that across the market, they artificially increase scarcity, which forces people to rent those apartments at inflated prices.
Yes, this is how the product works, it tells the price that will maximize the revenue.
>That's collusion by proxy
There is no such thing. If the agreement on prices exists then it's just collusion, if it does not - there is no collusion. Price fixing, which I suppose you mean by collusion is outlawed. Following market trends is not. The agreement on prices is the key element, without it there is no collusion. Nobody is coordinating anything, there is no agreement to set prices according to the marketing data. This is why stock advisors, appraisers, reports and any other pricing sources are not "collusion by proxy" since they are missing the collusion per se.
The national average is going to be lower than cities with housing crisis, because the country is large, and it's skewed by areas that are effectively ghost towns. My friends in New Orleans have had a 100% occupancy rate since the last major hurricane.
> There is no such thing. If the agreement on prices exists then it's just collusion, if it does not - there is no collusion. Price fixing, which I suppose you mean by collusion is outlawed. Following market trends is not. The agreement on prices is the key element, without it there is no collusion. Nobody is coordinating anything, there is no agreement to set prices according to the marketing data. This is why stock advisors, appraisers, reports and any other pricing sources are not "collusion by proxy" since they are missing the collusion per se.
I'm assuming you don't have a real estate license, because there are specific national laws (and often stricter state-level laws) related to collusion, and they differ and are considerably stricter than price fixing laws.
How do you know the unnamed company in the article is in a city witch such a crisis? To me it appears there was not enough demand so it had to discount its rents by a lot to get to the target 97%-98% occupancy and thus lost revenue.
And yes, I don't have a real estate license in Louisiana, so can you please name the specific laws you had in mind?
This quote is specifically from a company that had 50k units, normally ran with 100% occupancy, did some trials with the pricing company, which showed they could increase revenue by running at an occupancy of 98%, and has now pushed that lower to 95%. By lowering their occupancy rate, they're increasing housing pressure, which forces renters to accept their higher rates.
> And yes, I don't have a real estate license in Louisiana, so can you please name the specific laws you had in mind?
You don't have one at all, or you'd know the laws. Based on your responses I can tell you didn't read the article, and aren't debating in good faith, so I don't plan on continuing this.
I hear this a lot from certain quarters
This is the answer to most pop-Econ articles. It’s amazing how hard people want to believe that something else is to blame or that traditional economics doesn’t apply for some reason. Algorithms are a popular outrage-bait right now, so I’m not too surprised to see “the algorithm” blamed for high rents now, too.
But in this case, it's also the algorithm -- the article has multiple quotes where "empathy" is seen as a problem and that getting humans out of the loop is a boon to profit. The algorithm itself isn't the problem, it's the bloody-minded profit-seeking where capitalists leverage trust in the algorithm to extract maximum rents by leaving properties vacant in the midst of a housing crunch.
I guess what I’m saying is that the incentives are aligned here: property managers want to see units occupied, and so does everyone else.
Will they lower prices until 100% occupancy? No, there needs to be some unoccupied units or there would be no liquidity in the market (if there are no houses to rent and you want to move to a city, how could you move?).
It sounds like you're using the intuition of a person who hasn't captured a major portion of the rental market. You're going so far as telling me that property managers wouldn't do what the people involved with the company say they're doing. Needless to say, I'm not convinced.
Oh yes. Media often lament people radicalizing online supposedly because of them. But nobody is forced to follow recommendations, which are moreover labelled as such. People stay logged-in and indulge on them, and that's it.
Not if the company keeps apartments empty as mentioned in the article. With such an arrangement between landlords you can increase rent not matter the supply&demand.
There could be an Elysium scenario where the super-rich will pay anything to live in a high-demand area, so the prices go so high almost all properties end up empty. That doesn’t seem beneficial to society, the environment or anyone.
If there were strong vacancy taxes the situation would change. Vancouver has a 3% empty homes tax. Let’s keep raising a tax like that until managing empty properties becomes untenable. If we want people to have more affordable homes to buy we should incentivize people living in them over managing them for optimal profit.
California legislature is passing some housing good laws, but the state's attorney is not enforcing them. The non-profit CaRLA is doing the enforcement and having success [1]. Their wins in court have set precedent and unblocked a lot of building permits.
A city needs to upgrade multiple infrastructural elements simultaneously if it wants to make a successful leap into higher densities. In a democratic culture this means getting enough parties on board to accept a big jump in taxes for huge civic works projects like subways. To make all of this coherent this will take a massive and sustained political momentum which can exercise eminent domain in a very big way.
How much more revenue do you believe the city needs?
By all means allow people to build parking if they want to, but there’s no need for parking minimums.
I don’t see how more central planning could help. Our central planners love to block housing unless it meets 100 different conflicting requirements they make up on the spot. Just let people build!
I put algorithm in quotes, because it's clearly just a facade in front of good ol' fashioned price collusion.
As the example in the article points out, replace the word "algorithm" with "a guy named Bob" and suddenly it doesn't sound so innocent to say: The companies controlling 90% of apartments in a neighborhood give all their data to Bob, and then Bob tells each one what to price their apartments. It's price collusion by proxy, pure and simple.
We shouldn't just ignore it because it's not the biggest cause of the price increases. Yes, we absolutely need to tackle the housing supply problem, but at the same time we need to stop companies like this from exploiting the crisis and driving prices up even further.
If you stop "this one company" you'll just have someone else making profits and still have people homeless.
Do you honestly think any other property owner would touch companies like this if this one popped like that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...
> If you stop "this one company" you'll just have someone else making profits and still have people homeless.
And this new homes will be bought by ordinary people who for years paid inflated rents and have no real liquidity or corporations/landlords who have profited by renting and have more than enough cash to absorb any new properties that would become available on the market? Because grabbing them allows for a virtual monopoly on home ownership so people are forced to rent. And we have another cycle of capitalism.
> RealPage claims its software will increase revenue and decrease vacancies. But at times the company has appeared to urge apartment owners and managers to reduce supply while increasing price.
“Oh no, someone is clearly doing something illegal, if only we could do anything about it”.
Also we could legislate that apartments must target >80% occupancy in dense areas or face penalties for overpricing.
And there's your gig-workforce and companies like Uber that figured out that replacing blatantly illegal stuff with "AlgOriThMS" somehow takes governments long times to untwine and figure out that they're illegal shills.
But the in-person businesses can't do such tactics. But some venture capital financed outlet can dump hundreds of scooters on public areas, and socialize their costs and privatize their gains.
And yes, the article shows that this is collusion through a third party. I don't give a shit if it's an 'algorithm', Bob, or a tarot reading. It's collusion, and anyone involved needs to suffer.. up to and including being awarded the apartment/house.
But, we know the worst that'll happen is some lawyers will get millions, and the plebes will get a check for $100 off their rent at participating renters.
Does supply and demand affect housing prices? Yes, and the fact that supply has been constrained is affecting prices.
Is it the only factor? Probably not.
Even basic economics classes will teach that there are several ways that supply and demand breaks down.
For one, if there are imbalanced implications for both the supply and demand parties. For a landlord, rent is a purely economic transaction. Not taking a tenant means losing money. For a renter, not having a place to live is far more damaging. You lose shelter, safety, social standing, etc. The article touches on leaving an apartment empty for a couple months to find a tenant that will pay what you’re asking. But would anyone really go homeless for a couple months to save on rent? Not only that, but peoples lives revolves around where they live, and it’s not easy for a lot of people just to pick up and move to a different market.
Another way supply and demand might break down is if there is price collusion between parties on the supply side. This is relevant especially in this case because if there is a single party setting prices (eg the algorithm) and there is a constrained enough market, then you can in fact force people more than what typical supply and demand would imply.
We’ve outlawed construction. Any other factor besides this is far far behind.
Ok based on what? Like I think there are supply problems, but there are plenty of examples where the demand isn’t increasing much or is even decreasing but housing is still getting more expensive.
I get so tired of watching people declare things with an air of authority that are absolutely not true if you apply a modicum of thought to it.
The issue here is the collusion in place of competition.
I largely agree with the many angles here but I don't see it as a single "build it and they will come" issue.
I don't think it is there yet but are their rules about how much of the market can be owned by a single entity?
I know of a farmer who sold his farm and invested into housing. He had a big party when he got to 100. That was 20 years ago. Are there more of these "super investors" in the market?
After all, money is infinite, but land in the world is limited.
Yes, the software used by these properties is another way to engage in cartel-like behavior--price fixing.
'"Zoning is not a good institution gone bad. … On the contrary, zoning is a mechanism of exclusion designed to inflate property values, slow the pace of new development, segregate cities by race and class, and enshrine the detached single‐ family house as the exclusive urban ideal.” So writes M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It.'
https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2022/case-abolishing-zo...
Some of this is our own doing as well as we continue to up the requirements of building standards/codes. Some make more sense than others, but in general we don’t design building codes with costs in mind and I feel that’s a pretty large recipe for disaster.
Washington DC is a good example, for those unable to visit Europe.
Speaking as a Floridian living in Tampa (who just had a near miss with a Cat 4 hurricane) that is an extraordinarily poor choice of words. Building codes aren't supposed to be designed with costs front and center; they're supposed to be designed to foster a sturdy structure than can withstand most likely actual disasters. Go look at the footage of Ft Myers Beach and Sanibel Island for some perspective.
If the competitors never meet or agree on anything, is it still illegal?
1: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Here is a paper discussing the exact scenario: https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/sustainability/sustainabil...
No idea how the laws were written, but the vast majority were conceived before modern big data systems were possible, and even today most regulators are unprepared for arguments like this (from the article):
> Using software like YieldStar is “taking what we used to do manually on a yellow pad and calling people on the phone and putting it on a codified system where you take the errors out of the pricing,” he said.
Modern big data and ML capabilities mean that not only is the human removed from the details of the process, but even understanding the mechanics and relative weight of different inputs becomes all but impossible. Large-scale human-based processes can still feel opaque and arbitrary from the outside, but at least there are entry points for human empathy and (more importantly) accountability.
As we saw in the 2008 financial crisis, it's a very dangerous state of affairs when the risks and rewards of financial innovation are decoupled across different parties by means of opaque and unintelligible instruments. Computers are not the same as paper.
But for the most part this stuff doesn't work. And I think in this specific case if there were really some secret sauce they'd make a lot more money as property flippers. Buy underperforming property for cheap, apply secret magic, and sell much better performing property for much more would make you way more money than selling a SAAS.
> But for the most part this stuff doesn't work.
Yeah, not a great example when ML is frought with discriminatory biases or bizarre edge cases like Twitter banning people for posting innocuous pictures[0].
People get so blindsided by the magic they forget that these systems are often designed poorly, trained poorly, and cannot be easily explained.
[0] I can't find the link, but it was something like a picture of a bear that resulted in your account being immediately suspended.
What I am thinking of is that company that tried to get around copyright by having their customer's buy TV antennas located at their HQs and then they would stream the feed from the antenna to the customer. Every piece was technically legal but because the entire scheme resembled a patently illegal activity (profiting from distributing copies of copyrighted material) the courts shut them down.
Similar reasoning will be applied in this case. If enough of the market is using the same service to set prices, that will be struck down as collusion.
(All IMHO and IANAL)
Pricing algorithms wouldn’t be such an issue if it were easy to add new supply.
To this end, you get zoning rules, ever tightening building codes, impact fees, taxes, public hearings, and just straight up prohibitions on building.
On top of that we have all time record numbers of houses set to be completed over the next few months which are still being snapped up by investors.
We have a shortage of available housing. Not a shortage of housing (there are individual markets where this isn't true and there are actually shortages of physical units). Fortunately, this is to some degree in the process of correcting itself but I doubt the place we get to is going to be a solution that very many people are happy with either.
I've seen this canard so many times it physically hurts me.
I don't know where you found this so it's hard to provide specific debunking so I'll just go over all of them.
1) The houses aren't where people actually want to live. There is a lot of vacant housing in dying rural towns, mining sites, or the middle of nowhere. So unless you have a plan to get people to move to Buffalo-Butte then available housing there may as well not exist.
2) The most of the "vacant" homes aren't actually vacant. Depending on how badly the stats are gathered they will include a lot of garbage. Let's look at the list of things that considered vacant:
- Houses on the market for rent/sale
- Houses that have been rented/sold but not yet moved into
- Houses that unfit for human habitation
- Houses undergoing significant renovations
- Houses that are used seasonally
There is just not enough housing where people want to live. Objections like this only get brought up when someone is about a half-step away from proposition house rationing. Not for them though, other people should have their housing rationed.
If that's the battle you want to fight in life more power to you.
If you want to battle your way through needles and shit and piss and the mentally ill and drug addicted to go sit in an fancier office and to live in a city with some cool restaurants so you can pay 6k a month for a 400sqft apartment or have roommates at 30 feel free to do it. But I really have minimal sympathy for people who sign up for this and then complain loudly about how much it sucks.
Would this be in a way similar to how we've tied health care to employer-based insurance? If so, I'm not sure I'd want to be in a position where my employer subsidizing my housing makes it difficult to leave said employer for better opportunities or, god forbid, you lose your job and then home subsidy.
I can’t wait until “you’ll own nothing and like it” happens, so we can see a real revolution. People won’t stand for this, right?
https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/assistant
Report as 'something else'.
The optimal price for a seller is always "whatever the market will bear" - which we don't like the sound of it's a big "evil" corporation. But if any of us as individuals were selling a car for example, and some software would help us maximize the sale price, we would gladly use it - I don't see how the seller has a moral duty to take less money, same as the buyer has no moral duty to pay more
Discounts are often given to build relationships: Gillette razor handles are sold at a loss, so you'll keep buying Gillette razors; my loyal mechanic is willing to sell me a used car at a smaller than maximum profit, since he knows I'll come to him for service; I'm willing to sell my labor for less than the maximum, in order to work on an exciting project that will greatly advance my career.
Short-term profit is often the enemy of long-term profitability.
Looking for a lower price implies relocating which tends to have a huge cost. So it's not a free market.
So the whole debate here, as far as I understand is, how ethical is all this. Is it ethical to squeeze every last cent out of a person looking to house themselves and their family?
The literal roof over the head is generally affordable - but having it in the location and standard people want is where it gets expensive.
However the desirable area and standard of housing is a want not a necessity. I want it too btw, same as everyone else!
The other thing I wonder, is if everyone is 'entitled' to a nice area and house, who pays for it all, and how do we fit everyone into the nicer areas?
Restricted supply and barriers to entry favor cartels and explicit or tacit price collusion.
Necessities can also provide steady tax revenue, since people are basically forced into paying the (usually regressive) tax.
The resulting high prices are, of course, terrible for people who actually need these necessities.
The market for addictive drugs (nicotine, etc.) has similar properties, though with some risk of legal or regulatory penalties.
Not actually true. Lots of people discount or donate $ or labor or commodities by choice, as cash flow is only one of many things different people want to maximize. You've made the mistake of assuming one kind of economic behavior is the default for everyone. It isn't. There are 4 predominant patterns of economic behavior that emerge in simple economic games:
No, it's those blasted algorithms.
>No, it's those blasted algorithms.
You're spot-on about free money encouraging people to overspend. In Canada it's common knowledge that people would borrow against their house to put down payments into other houses, which they would borrow against to put down payments on other houses, etc.
But an effect can have more than one causes, and algorithms driving up the prices is another cause.
E.g., the op, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-08/zillow-z-...
Yikes!
Simple solution is not to print money. Capitalism is not the problem.
Downvote it all you want, money printing is the issue - not “capitalism”. Sound money eliminates this problem.
Commodity and housing prices have had steep price increases well before central banks printed money excessively.
What I can tell you is that the answer almost certainly boils down to:
(1) we can't moderate what we don't see, so yes - the standards get applied inconsistently, and
(2) Passionate ideologues of every flavor are convinced that we secretly let the other side off easier. The actual dynamics are random but everybody overinterprets the randomness—always in the same direction: the mods are against me. The mods are not against you.
An obvious place to start would be deeply nested sub-threads with a low # of participants like this one, which was eventually pruned by being flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33225480
I don't feel you're 'against me', because I didn't have any participation in the thread at the time most of the discussion took place, and in any case it's been years since you shut down any of my comments.
What perplexes me is how a subthread like the one above (which got pretty snarky) was allowed to evolve without interference, whereas you acted quickly to chastise a person who made a single comment that didn't kick off a flamewar, and wasn't directed at any HN user or group of people.
Certainly nobody has the time, will, or desire to read every comment, but it's easy to observe the structure of a thread in diagrammatic form and see behavioral signals emerging before getting to any of the textual content.