The propublica article linked at the beginning of this thread is how I learned about these parasites. Definitely recommend.
https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...
https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...
> One advantage RealPage’s data warehouse had was its access to actual lease transactions — giving it the true rents paid, instead of simply those a landlord advertised, RealPage said.
The above quote is the most substantive description of info sharing I could find in the section "Who Uses the Software and How It Work" in the article you linked. Is the claim that the secretive info being shared is the actual rents tenants are paying? Are companies and people not normally allowed to share that?
Companies and people generally do not share this information publicly and most companies consider it extremely proprietary.
So yes, that what's these lawsuits are about. All these companies share this extremely sensitive data (Vacancy data, actual rent and length of rental contract) with RealPage, Realpage algorithms use it to price rent.
(1) That sellers are exchanging pricing information among each other without also revealing that info to buyers.
(2) That the shared pricing information is unusually comprehensive.
(3) That sellers are tacitly coordinating through the algorithmically suggested prices.
As far as I can tell, the legal issue is #3, you are (I think) suggesting the important feature is #2, and my tentative opinion is that #1 is probably the most influential in distorting the market to shift surplus from buyers to sellers.
And no, these are not routinely shared publicly. Landlords are allowed to open their books, but for-profit businesses generally do not do so without specific incentive, because it is more profitable to keep trade secrets. Even if they wanted to, how would they do so? I'm not aware of a nonprofit data hub for them to dump all of this for public consumption (and if I don't know, I'm confident random slumlords in Cincinnati also don't). Maybe RealPage can make a free and open one if they are so committed to just making good honest tools for well-informed market participants.
The publicly scrapable data is: advertisements to prospective new tenants for the buildings who have tenants that recently announced their intent to move (or were evicted). They frequently won't even have specific unit numbers attached to them. They only have to be accurate enough to solicit inquiries and not get the landlord sued, an extremely low bar, especially in a hot market (where RealPage reaps its profits). The data availability is night and day.
All I see is this: "A company representative said in an email that RealPage “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”"
The only non-public data are it's own customers. But if I'm a massive landlord with multiple units, I have the same advantage?
The entire point is that monopolization confers the same advantage that this scheme does.
Another illegal option is collusion. That is a group of competitors get together and set a price that they will all use, again independent of actual Market value, just because the colluders have sufficient control of a market that when they set a price people have no choice but to pay it. This is super effective when the market it not fundamentally “free” like housing, gas, power, healthcare, etc.
What these companies are doing is providing a tool to launder the collusion between competitors in a market, by having every “competitor” in the market get an “algorithmic” price that is fundamentally tied to the “algorithmic” price they provide every other “competitor”.
If these landlords got together in a room and decided the prices as is happening here, it would be more or less immediately subjected to scrutiny. By doing the same thing via a third party and calling it an “algorithm” it is somehow not subject to the same restrictions.
Because it certainly works over decades-term.
Standard still had 70% market share when it was charged, and 64% by the time it was broken up.
Over the ~40 years it existed, it was incredibly profitable.
Apple has, what, 20% smartphone market share?
And look at the margins they're able to run. Granted, boosted by platform lock-in.
I offer that if you get to fix prices for a good chunk of 40 years, and then still end up with 64% market share... it does work.
In the sense that your company will have made obscene amounts of money, by price fixing, while the above played out.
If your rebuttal is that in the end they lost market share, true. But they made enough money before that happened that it's still a win.
If you're interested in the subject, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin is a fascinating read.
How do I square that with the lesson that I learned from the Bible? While price fixing is not mentioned in it it is pretty clear that it says that price fixing works
"While you may put whatever prices you wish on the goods and services you provide, those prices will become economic realities only if others are willing to pay them, and that depends not on whatever prices you have chosen, but on how much consumers want what you offer, and on what other producers charge for the same goods and services."
So, maybe the 6th edition could be better equipped for ctrl+f economists, with all the communist propaganda words indexed to subsections.
I’m not really sure why you would impugn my mind for economics but perhaps since “read a book” qualifies as an argument, I might recommend that you try out The Living Bible? It is written in a plain English for those that may struggle with the vocabulary of the King James Version. There is no shame in not being able to get the clear and obvious message here, but thankfully the Good Book has versions for every level of reader :)
I look forward to hearing your thoughts after reading it!
Yeah you're gonna need some pretty strong support to make a claim like that - and not just an anecdote from the internet. Do you have any new proof upending long solidified economics?