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Comment by MengerSponge | Hacker News Reader

Cartel Activity As A Service

I saw another comment on this topic how before the software existed, these companies would call up their competitor's offices to get their pricing. My understanding is this software does the same thing (via scraping their websites?).

I'm not sure I fully understand the issue? like should competitors not be allow to price themselves based on their competitors? collecting competitor pricing data shouldn't be real-time and automatic? Corporate landlords shouldn't/can't hire consulting firms to assist with pricing based on their competitor's data?

If most/all of the major players used the same consulting firm, wouldn’t that be a conflict of interest that borders on - perhaps even is outright - breaking the law?

My understanding is that it goes well beyond that. If I recall correctly, as a condition of using their service to show you competitor's prices and industry information, you also had to agree to use their suggested pricing.

how is this different from all hotels using booking.com or airbnb and getting suggestion pricing from them?

Are you asking how a middleman is different than a consultant firm controlling the industry via proxy?

There’s a difference between researching your competitors prices (to set your prices accordingly) and coming to an agreement with your competitors to set a particular price. The former is market research (to which your competitor is free to respond) but the latter is price fixing. Price fixing is illegal because it’s anticompetitive: it reduces competition in the market directly by forming a conspiracy or cartel against the public.

calling other offices didn't involve sending a representative from a company to make sure that you were pricing in line with the algorithm and if you weren't pricing in line with the algorithm punishing you by excluding you from being able to use the services, it is cartel-like behavior. there is a severe problem with this.

The issue is that housing should be a right and that precludes pricing housing based off of "how much of the average persons income can we consume with this".

The pricing for rental property should be based off of the cost of money to acquire the property + the cost of upkeep + some profit margin and rental companies should be competing to undercut each other on each of the three rather than just seeing how much __more__ they can price their units than their competition.

I agree that housing should be a right, but I feel like Realpage is becoming a convenient scapegoat that distracts from the core issue of capital being incentivized to seek profits to the detriment of society.

This is late-stage capitalism and I'd rather see discussion around policy to fix the core issues rather than bikeshedding about what material to use for the bandaid on the gunshot wound.

if that were true, then rent should be much higher now. Renters can take advantage of past low interest rates from landlords. If rent was calculated based on the cost to acquire the property today, upkeep (refinancing), then rents would be much much higher.

It doesn't do quite the same thing. You're correct that pre-YieldStar, properties would call their comps once or twice a month to get their local competitors prices. YieldStar pricing is mostly based on leases that have been signed, not what prices are being advertised. RealPage's YieldStar gets a daily feed of actual leasing activity from all RealPage's clients. If clients use RealPage's leasing software the transfer happens automatically in the background, otherwise RealPage helps set up a daily extract & transfer of leasing data to YieldStar.

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