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Comment by vel0city | Hacker News Reader

> as in you had to contact a support rep

This is untrue. The escalation would be to the property's management team, which is the same group which configured the tool to use the recommended pricing.

> If there is a disagreement between the participating Lessor and the RealPage Pricing Advisor, the dispute is often elevated to the Lessor’s management for resolution, and specific reasons justifying a departure from RealPage’s pricing level are usually required.

If I take a Playstation to the checkout counter at Walmart and say "Instead of $500, how about $450?", the person at the checkout counter doesn't have the authorization to change the price from the price enforced by the checkout system. They'd have to call over a manager and make the case as to why I should be able to buy it for $450 instead of the enforced price the system already set.

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From skimming over the relevant portions of the complaint that this quote is excerpted from, it looks like "Lessor's management" is probably the management team employed by RealPage to manage the Lessor's property (Lessor having ceded management from themselves to RealPage). Please explain if this is not the case.

See sections 46 and 47 in the complaint:

46. RealPage and participating Lessors have provided one another with such mutual assurances, agreeing among themselves not to compete on price for the sale of multifamily residential real estate leases. They have effectuated their agreement through two mutually reinforcing mechanisms. First, participating Lessors have agreed to set prices using RealPage’s coordinated algorithmic pricing. Second, participating Lessors have agreed to stagger their lease renewal dates through RealPage, to avoid (otherwise natural) oversupplies in rental properties.

47. RealPage’s coordinated algorithmic pricing allows participating Lessors, in RealPage’s words, to “outsource [their] daily pricing and ongoing revenue oversight” to RealPage, with RealPage pricing participating Lessors’ “properties as if we [RealPage] own them ourselves”—that is, as if RealPage and its participating Lessors were operating as a monopolist.

RealPage isn't in the property management business. They don't manage properties themselves, they make software for property managers to consume.

Then why are "Lessors" mentioned as the ones agreeing to RealPage's policies and not "Property Managers"? And why is the term used "Lessor's management team", and not "Lessor's property management team"?

I think you might be right, it just doesn't seem obvious to me.

You'd probably need to understand a bit more about the basics of these large property ownership and management to kind of get what all is at play here. I'm more versed in commercial property management, but large scale apartment residential isn't often far off.

So you'll have some group of investors which pool together a bunch of money (like REITs, not always) and buy a building (normally the people who build these things don't hold on to them very long, lots of specialization). This organization is the "ownership".

The ownership usually doesn't know/doesn't want to deal with the day to day management of the property, they're just the financials kind of people. They hire a management company. The management company works with the ownership to understand budgets for the building, expected revenues, etc. Management deals with all the contractors to make the building operate.

Often, the management company then hires a leasing company, or might have a leasing arm of the company. This is then the sales side of the whole business of the building. These people are then in charge of finding tenants and be a bit of the outward customer facing side of the operation. These are the people you'd talk to when you're wanting to negotiate on pricing. However, they don't directly control the prices. Remember, ownership wants to ensure certain revenues for the building, and management is in charge of hitting budgets. So that front line agent just making up numbers all willy-nilly can have a lot of effects on not just that leasing company, but the management company that contracted them, and the ownership company that contracted the management company. That person you're talking to about the lease might be a contractor of a contractor of the ownership of the building, and ultimately it's the ownership's money on the line.

All of these groups are often different organizations and companies, and this structure is just one example out of many. As mentioned, sometimes management teams have their own leasing arms. Sometimes ownerships have preferred leasing partners and will push management to use some other leasing company. So its not always a single "this person always reports to that person" kind of structure, so that's why its pretty vague in these filings.

Thanks, that makes sense.

I responded to this in another comment; TL;DR I believe you're looking at the wrong paragraph in the article.

The first approval is done by the Pricing Advisor (an employee of RealPage) and a second approval is done by a manager at the Lessor's office.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34928065

I used to work for a large property management company that used YieldStar, the initial approval went through an in-house team and final approval happened by on-site staff. Smaller companies that couldn't justify an in-house team would use YieldStar for the initial review/approval.

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