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Comment by Nifty3929 | Hacker News Reader

There are really three things going on: secular inflation causing overall upward price trends, industry-specific restrictions on building housing in many places, and an increasing population.

Each of these things should be discussed separately in order to have a productive conversation about the overall results of rents still going up quickly.

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Really? The reasons you gave are perpetual. Don't you think that the real reason, in this moment in history, is that landlords are colluding on rents? If we enforced anti-competitive laws, and raised property taxes in the suburbs to a level commensurate with the maintenance costs of those areas' infrastructure, it would solve a lot of these problems.

> “Don't you think that the real reason, in this moment in history, is that landlords are colluding on rents?”

The lawsuit that could shake up the rental market [1]

AirBandB

Hedge fund investing in real estate

To name a few

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/11/1197961038/the-indicator-from...

Not generally, no. Certainly some areas are experiencing landlord collusion, but in general colluding is extremely difficult as a landlord because rental properties are so decentralized. Nowhere in the US do we have anything like berlin where 3 companies own the majority of units. The sheer amount of collaboration required to collude when there are thousands of suppliers makes it very unlikely in most cases.

I agree with you - though one mechanism for implied and unintended collusion would be rental pricing services that are widely used by landlords and might cause prices to converge or be self-reinforcing. I don't believe this argument, but I do think it merits consideration and counterargument.

That is, it needn't be explicit collusion where thousands of landlords get together - it might just be because they're all using the same price forecasting service.

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