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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, there's nothing inherently wrong with algorithmic pricing. Issues would start to occur if the pricing was actively manipulated and RealPage was used by so many landlords in some geographic areas that competition broke down. That may be hard to prove.

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The pricing is manipulated though. If you’re part of RealPage, it will “recommend” the prices to set for your apartments, except you as the landlord are only allowed to disagree a small % of the time, or else you can get kicked out from the apartment mafia.

So to keep their customers happy, RealPage will configure it to keep increasing prices, and it’s not really in any landlords’ interest to disagree.

I live in a building managed by a group that uses RealPage. They keep increasing prices and say “Computer says this is $X, can’t do anything, sorry”.

A relevant excerpt from the complaint:

> RealPage-defined submarkets identified in Appendix A are relevant markets in which the agreements between RealPage and AIRM and YieldStar users to align pricing has harmed, or is likely to harm, competition and thus renters. In each of these markets, the penetration rate for at least (i) AIRM and YieldStar, or (ii) AIRM, YieldStar, and OneSite ranges from at or around 29% to more than 60%.10

So I worked for RealPage for a few years in the late 90s and again in the mid 2000s, and at the time they didn’t hold a majority of the market. But it would not surprise me now if they held a majority of the market in large complexes today. At the time they were growing mostly by acquisition of competitors.

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