DOJ will examine whether RealPage helped landlords coordinate rent increases

The point of a monopoly is to manipulate the price by increasing or decreasing production, and this is why you need a produced good. Actual prices are set by whatever the market can bear.

But there is no such thing -- even conceptually -- in a market for non-produced goods such as land. Now that doesn't mean they can't be in violation of some law -- maybe they were coordinating to exclude bad tenants based on a protected category or something like that.

But then you will first object, "The land isn't produced, but the structure on the land is produced" and then I'll say that if there was an accusation of collusion among homebuilders, then you would have a point. But not landlords (there are many examples of monopolistic practices in housing, but in the form of zoning regulations).

And then a second objection is "Renting also requires property management services to owners. Maybe there is a collusion among those providing property management to charge more" -- but they are charging the property owner, and it's a field with such relative low entrance bars that it's hard to imagine owners getting screwed by some collusion among property managers.

at a high level, yes, there is a "market rate" for apartments that is driven by supply and demand. you won't have a lot of luck trying to let a 1 BR for double the median 1 BR rent in that neighborhood. but individual units are not fungible either; landlords can definitely charge more for units that have been more recently renovated, better layouts, nicer views, etc. plus or minus $50 on rent might not make much difference to a tenant, but having the data to make those little adjustments could matter a lot to a landlord with hundreds of units. this isn't something you can get just by scraping zillow.

Efficient way how to find market rate?

According to their website, the issue in question is "price discovery" -- e.g. let's say the market price is $1000 a month for your unit, but you don't know the market price because, for example, a long term rent controlled tenant just left, and they were paying $400 or something. Or maybe you had a tenant that was paying $1200 and he left because he found a better place for less.

So what do you charge?

You can try to charge $2000, wait four months, get no takers, then lower to $1800, wait four months, etc. Or you look at realpage, which says similarly priced units sold for $1000 in your area, so you advertise for $1000 and get a tenant. For the individual small time landlord, price discovery is not easy and it can be very costly. Realpage provides it to you for a small fee. Larger corporate landlords probably have their own people dedicated to price discovery and so they may not benefit as much, but even then, you are centralizing the data collection process so not every landlord needs to do their own legwork. Why not just look at some of the websites that do statistics of craigslist asking prices? Well, in some sense that's all that's going on here, except with clean data and hopefully adjusting for biases -- e.g. if you look at averages of asking rents, you will get an over-estimate of rents because those who don't find buyers keep their advertisement up longer than those who find a buyer, so there is some adjustment that needs to be performed on an average of craigslist asking prices. Also that data tends to be dirty and doesn't have good coverage. I wouldn't be surprised if all that realpage is doing is massaging this data and fixing it up, plus adding in other data sources to get a propriety estimate.

That's the value of this one feature.

Of course, real page also handles online billing and a lot of the standard services you would expect from a property management app, but those services aren't at issue here. Point is, having realtime data about what people are paying is useful. That's why Zillow has estimates, and we don't look at that as a pricing cartel. Kelly Blue Book also has price estimates, etc. Even stock exchanges sell price data -- it's just a useful, valuable commodity.

Small landlords often don’t want to deal with annoying their tenant so they don’t raise rent unless they feel they “need” to - and appreciation makes them feel they don’t need to.

Middling landlords (owning one or two 20 or so unit buildings) often are aiming more for cash flow and minimum vacancy, so they often have pricing out of date. (Ask people in your are who rent which apartments never have vacancies - you’ve found the underpriced one).

Large landlords (many thousands of units) have vacancy targets and formulas and comps to determine rent as best they can - not because it makes them money per se but that it raises the value of the property (which for large complexes is a simple formula based on rents) allowing more loans for more properties.

RealPage is trying to provide that “large landlord” stuff to the other two.

Why cartels can't work in industries with numerous competitors is literally an Econ 101 topic. Historic cartels only succeed with majority market share and high concentration among a few players. We don't see anything like that in real estate. Not even remotely close.

Your example also doesn't make sense to me. A cartel controlling 2% of the inventory of apartments in a city holds a few apartments off the market. This would indeed raise the equilibrium price, but doesn't benefit the cartel participants. All the excess profits in that scenario are flowing to non-participants. It's the perfect backwards cartel!

I'm not sure where you are going with this, because there really are only a few options, all of which fall into two buckets: private ownership or government/state/tribal ownership.

We are already at the lower bound. We have already lost human dignity. You either need to afford 1k per month or be homeless. This homelessness is to spare them the indignity of living in a 350 sqft efficiency?

Build more housing. Remove parking minimums. Remove minimum unit sizes. End density restrictions. 8 units on every lot.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

which took effort to obtain - either by sacrificing consumption, or by working more or doing more valuable work.

The banks' mortgage is the fact that there's evidence that you have the productivity to service said mortgage.

If you cannot show evidence that such a mortgage can be serviced, the bank will not lend you money. Lending isn't free - there's risk involved.

Calling it passive income with little to no effort is just hiding the work that went on previously. You only see the results, and not the work that went into achieving it.