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Comment by bbreier | Hacker News Reader

> But RealPage emphasizes the need for discipline among participating Lessors and urges them that for its coordinated algorithmic pricing to be the most successful in increasing rents, participating Lessors must adopt RealPage’s pricing at least 80% of the time.

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Sure, I'm not trying to make any argument here that this is a good system or that it isn't afoul of any antitrust/price fixing or anything along those lines.

I'm just stating this idea that many seem to have here that these prices are being enforced behind RealPage support agents manually approving price changes is incorrect. In fact, property managers can choose to just not use this price tool at all, and manually set their prices, which can also require employees to submit approvals for price changes.

The whole "await approval" thing isn't the problem, that's just normal for lots of places. Lots of places require some kind of management approval to adjust prices.

The rub is that the suggested pricing is the default that doesn't require extra layers of approval with an included reasoning for deviating. All the pressure is for using the price derived from the proprietary information of other companies-that would be price fixing. It's not the process, so much as the source except that the process is set up to encourage as universal adoption as possible to keep the scam going.

As mentioned elsewhere, chances are even if the property management manually set prices for every unit these same leasing agents would still have to submit approvals for changes to these prices. Its just that those with actual price authority for the building chose to set the prices for those units to be whatever the algorithm suggests by default.

Just like the person at the checkout counter can't just arbitrarily sell me a PS5 for $5.

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