> What value is being provided by RealPage?
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.