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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>Armed with competing landlords’ data, RealPage also encourages loyalty to the algorithm’s recommendations through, among other measures, “auto accept” functionality and pricing advisors who monitor landlords’ compliance.

I think the "private prices" + "autoaccept" + "compliance" is the key misbehavior that gets RealPage into legal trouble.

If competitors want to converge on prices in a legal manner, they have to do out in the open via "price signaling" via public posting of prices. That's how it's legally possible for competitors in other industries to do it:

- gas stations looking at each others signs of prices and quickly adjusting to match;

- e-auctions like Ebay/Reverb showing a seller what the previous range of sold prices were;

- Kelly "Blue Book" showing current used car market prices

- Zillow publicly showing rental rates, etc.

Neither the platform nor the sellers in those examples get in trouble for "price fixing".

In contrast, the privately shared pricing with compliance monitoring by the platform is too coordinated to avoid legal scrutiny.

View on HN

"compliance" alone is a sufficient misbehavior. No matter how people get to a price number, you can't have a contract or any other mechanism for the competitors to try and enforce the coordinated price, that's straight out wrong by itself.

The classic way that businesses openly coordinate their pricing is via price matching. Businesses advertise their preferred prices but also promise that they'll match lower prices from competitors. Competitors see these advertisements and set their own prices to approximately match.

The FTC does not consider this type of open signaling to be price fixing:

> Q: Our company monitors competitors' ads, and we sometimes offer to match special discounts or sales incentives for consumers. Is this a problem?

> A: No. Matching competitors' pricing may be good business, and occurs often in highly competitive markets. Each company is free to set its own prices, and it may charge the same price as its competitors as long as the decision was not based on any agreement or coordination with a competitor.

Source: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

Price matching was something that really worked in the past, again in the days before mass digitization and cheap storage/printing. Add in there are only a few major retailers left, it becomes easy to make a product for each of them.

CostCow will have product 0ICU812a

WalWart will have product 0ICU812b

Then they don't have to actually price match because they are "different products"

Online stores seem to match prices; when I google for some electronic equipment (like headphones or MIDI controllers), many stores have almost equal prices for the same item. Of course there is a chance that all they are owned by the same entity, but it is not very plausible.

That's probably the MSRP for the item. (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/manufacturers-suggested...)

that's not really price fixing in so much that price matching in this manner is known to lead to a race to the bottom.

this is very different from, "leasing agent, set this high price or get fired by your employer."

The rub is that if store and store b got together and negotiated a price they would stick to and not try to undercut each other, that's price fixing, and that is what realpage is doing on a MASSIVE scale.

'Cartel/Corporate' owners own ~70% of the units in Seattle. 11 total companies (big names you should know like gray star and equity residential), to the one they all use realpage. That's 70% of the market price fixed, MINIMUM.

Before your second paragraph: I Googled about it and found this ProPublica story: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...

The exact quote:

    > In one neighborhood in Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of apartments were overseen by just 10 property managers, every single one of which used pricing software sold by RealPage.

To be clear, that is "one neighborhood" in Seattle. Your second paragraph makes it seem like all of Seattle. To be clear, in neighborhoods with lots of new high rise buildings, this pattern seems normal to me: About 10 companies (or less) do most of the property management.

That neighborhood is the neighborhood amazon is in South Lake Union. But as far as I can tell every corporate building in town uses them which is a wild amount of buildings.

I think you're over analyzing and confusing things. Price fixing is when competitors work together to raise prices above what they would normally be in a competitive market.

Using your gas station example, a gas station isn't going to look at a competitor selling gas at $4.15 and decide to raise their price to $4.45. They would lower their price to match the competition, otherwise they'd lose sales and make less money. Price fixing would be if both gas stations decided to raise their price to $4.45 at the same time so that customers don't have a choice.

The analogy also works in the opposite direction. If a gas station is selling at $4.10 a gallon and another down the street is selling at $4.15, the first gas station could happily up their price to $4.14. 1% more revenue and they're still the cheapest on the block.

Competitive markets keep things within a tolerance, imo. If the average is $4.10 then you can expect the price to vary up and down by some amount depending on location and other things provided.

What RealPage does is distinct because it assures prices are always above and by orders of magnitude what they should be. It also achieves that through private communication which I think is generally accepted as a problem.

Order of magnitude is generally accepted as starting at 10x. Are you saying rents are 10-100x higher because of RealPage?

You're right, order of magnitude wasn't the right choice of words. They're 3-4x what they should be, and RealPage is responsible for a sizeable portion on its own, which is saying something.

And if there is a third also selling at $4.10? Unless they privately coordinate and collude, its hard for this to work for artificial price increases.

I think one thing that's weird to me is that Shell and Exxon or 76 or whatever all somehow got their gas to be somewhere in the same ballpark. You'd expect to see that some gas companies can't get their shit together and can't figure out how to extract, purify, and distribute gas at anything less than $500 per gallon. Now, naturally you'd expect those companies to just go out of business. And you'd also expect to see at least one that figures out how to do all of that for $1 per gallon. Yet, here they all are, selling it around the same price. It's too strange in my opinion. There is collusion happening in many markets. I suspect they are all producing it for way less which is why one of them doesn't suddenly go out of business, but the fact that they're not selling it so low that the competitors simply go out of business - again a collusion signal.

Relevant: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-senate-committee-...

They are all selling the same gas from the same refinery. They might have slightly different additives but otherwise it all comes from the same place. you can't afford shipping costs to get gass from a different refinery (unless you are on a territory border)

the only question is how much profit to put on top and even then they have to be careful as if they go too low their competetors won't follow and then they have to pay extra for an unscheuled delivery just to fill their tank.

i'm reasonable certian that small stations are illegally colluding in some cases.

Many do go out of business, and many substantially undercut others. This is particularly true for the diesel market, where OTR truck operators are more price sensitive. Most stations are buying gas around similar prices at the terminal, but their overhead to provide the station can vary wildly between large chains and small, family owned stations.

“Skimmers” (drastically lower-priced diesel stations) are a real threat to larger chain stations. They don’t put them out of business entirely for a number of reasons, but one is because gas stations ultimately sell more than gas/diesel (e.g. a clean bathroom is often worth a few extra cents per gallon for me, but there’s a lot more than that too). Also any given station can’t sell an infinite amount of fuel. Beyond tank capacity, wait times are a real impact on sales volume, and so if a station offers a price too low (even if still profitable), it is just leaving money on the table.

So not to say collusion doesn’t happen, but one can also arrive at similar pricing with a commodity like gas without it. Especially since fuel margins are typically low.

The theory is correct, but the example is not the best: petrol prices are not as elastic as you'd think.

If I need to make a left turn across traffic or go around the block I'm not topping off at a station just for 5 cents/gal. (Tho, I might make a mental note & use that station when I'm coming down the other way, when it's easy to in & out.)

Los Angeles in particular is crazy. We have the equivalent to micro-climates with fuel prices. Stations a half mile apart can be 30¢ different. Stations a town apart can be 70–80¢ different.

And there are a couple of stations in Beverly Hills adjacent that are ~$2.50 more than the going rate (no surprise there, tho).

>, a gas station isn't going to look at a competitor selling gas at $4.15 and decide to raise their price to $4.45. They would lower their price to match the competition, otherwise they'd lose sales and make less money.

But the airlines are also doing the opposite of your scenario: they also raise prices instead of lower them via legal "price signaling" via publicized fares[1] in the global reservations system.

Competitors can converge on a higher price instead of a lower price. It's not just one direction. They just need to do it via public price signaling to stay out of legal trouble.

In 2022, Apple Music raised their subscription from $9.99 to $10.99. Spotify then followed them and also raised their price to $10.99. By 2023, they both converged on $10.99. I think right now in 2024, Spotify is $1 higher at $11.99. Nobody should be surprised if Apple Music also raises its to $11.99.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=It+is+now+common+for+an+airl....

> Competitors can converge on a higher price instead of a lower price. It's not just one direction. They just need to do it via public price signaling to stay out of legal trouble.

I don't understand what you're saying. Are you saying that companies are colluding, but not really because the prices are public? Most prices are public, just walk into any supermarket or open Amazon.com and you'll see public prices. If a company bases their price on a competitor's price, that's not collusion, that's just a pricing strategy. If a company is able to price a product above their competitors and still succeed (e.g. by investing more in marketing), that's legal too.

> In 2022, Apple Music raised their subscription from $9.99 to $10.99. Spotify then followed them and also raised their price to $10.99. By 2023, they both converged on $10.99. I think right now in 2024, Spotify is $1 higher at $11.99. Nobody should be surprised if Apple Music also raises its to $11.99.

Streaming is not an example of a healthy market IMO. I don't know the economics of it all, but I know all the streaming services need to pay the same record labels. Whatever is going on there, it's weird that they all cost the same. I currently pay $10.99/month for Tidal, which is the same exact price as most other services. I wouldn't be surprised if there was collusion going on there, maybe even something like RealPage behind the scenes. There's also the factor of Apple and Google's monopolies over apps, and I wonder if undercutting Apple/Youtube is bad for business.

> But the airlines are also doing the opposite of your scenario: they also raise prices instead of lower them via legal "price signaling" via publicized fares[1] in the global reservations system.

The link you posted seems to be a google search page? Not sure what you meant by that.

> If a company is able to price a product above their competitors and still succeed (e.g. by investing more in marketing), that's legal too.

Yes, but it also runs counter to the idea that free markets tend to drive prices down through competition. In reality, 1 of 2 things happens:

a) companies try to differentiate their products enough to not be direct competitors (e.g. exclusive content on streaming platforms, or platform lock-in), and both/all charge more

b) one company buys the other to kill their competition

No one actually lowers their prices to compete anymore, because we abandoned enforcing anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws decades ago.

Sorry, but that is nonsense and I have no idea what point you're trying to make. You're saying that competition doesn't drive down prices by giving two examples of how companies avoid competition.

> You're saying that competition doesn't drive down prices by giving two examples of how companies avoid competition.

The point is that the intuitive wisdom that free market competition lowers prices of goods is not now, nor has it ever been the truism that it's postured as, because the businesses within that market have a huge selection of tools and strategies at their disposal to avoid direct competition.

And this makes sense. Why in the world would you subject your business to the unmediated competition of a free market? Yeah, it's totally possible for you to create a product so innately better that you own the market by virtue of that, but that's like... hard. It's way easier to create brand-lock-in to incentivize your existing customers to stay in your "ecosystem," or to create an innovative unique feature and patent it so your competition can't use it, or use snobby/elitist marketing to make your product more enticing to people who seek status, or shit, go the other way, make it humble and down to earth, and appeal to a sense of "genuineness," or tie yourself to patriotism and put flags all over your product, whatever it might be. There's tons of ways you can make people want your thing that have fuck-all to do with the thing.

I think this is a serious fault in how pro-free-market people tend to think, which is this constant positioning of people as rational actors who will choose the best product for their needs, and it's utter nonsense. People buy stuff for stupid reasons constantly.

No, your time horizon is too short. Prices go up in the short term, which increases profits, which incentivizes competition, which brings prices down in the long term. A few years of increased prices is worth increased efficiency over decades. Prices are going in most industries, US markets are generally quite competitive.

Increasing profits often doesn't incentivize competition, especially when barriers to entry are high. Instead, it decreases competition by giving existing corporations even more money and power to use against newcomers. Look at what happened to Bandcamp: bought up by a music licensing company and gutted.

> which increases profits, which incentivizes competition

This is a fantasy. Give two examples of major markets where competition has increased recently.

The US economy has grown what, 4 times since 1990’s but the number of registered companies has fallen by half.

Does the sheer number of companies correlate with competition?

I can imagine simple hypotheticals like:

A. Two companies that compete with one another in each of markets 1, 2, and 3.

B. Three companies, each with a monopoly on a single market.

I know nothing.

Increasing profits just enables attacking competitors in other ways than via product competition. The narrative that profits get turned into RnD instead of executive bonuses and stock buybacks or acquisitions is a Econ 101 fantasy.

In the real world, Cisco, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft don't make better products to win, they just buy Splunk, Insta, Whole Foods, and Bethesda.

I would also like to point out that the "long term" is just a collection of several "short terms", so if the short terms are only price increases (which they are), then the long term will also just be that.

This is oligopoly. If there are less than four major players, price competition seems to stop. There's a EU study on this, which I've referenced before. More than four, and someone will drop their price to $8.99, grow their market share, and make more money. When the number of competitors is very small, and you already have major market share, it's very hard to grow market share by lowering prices. So price competition stops.

It doesn't take collusion. It's a result of size alone.

> They would lower their price to match the competition, otherwise they'd lose sales and make less money.

- they could also see their competitor raise their price to from $4.00 to $4.15 (for whatever reason) and decide that they can raise their price as well without losing customers.

They can do both things, and both things are described by Edgeworth Price Cycles[0].

In gas prices, there's undercutting to draw business -- which seems natural in a free market. That's often smaller, local players who drive this stage, pricing things just below the nearby competition, but players of all sizes are involved.

But sometimes, the price jumps up -- often by a significant margin, and across the board. This is often at the behest of a big player; when company like Exxon Mobil seemingly-arbitrarily raises gas prices in an area, it tends to set a trend. The smaller players tend to raise prices in accordance with this higher baseline and are happy to see the financial relief.

This may seem counterintuitive in a competitive market, but it does happen anyway. And it's all temporary and cyclical, as we've all seen over and over again. Free markets aren't necessarily stable systems that are free of resonance.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgeworth_price_cycle

If instead the 2 gas stations were both selling at $4.45 and looked around and decided not to lower their prices to $4.15 even though they could, it's equivalent.

Or one of them could lower to 4.35 and take all the business. Which is normally what would happen without collusion.

I don't have a source for this, so take it as you wish, but as I remember what I read, duopolies can be quite stable. Three party cartels can go either way.

But with 4 or more participants, someone will inevitably betray the others out of greed.

Hence the other aspects of antitrust law. Albeit not enforced well of late.

Price fixing would be if both gas stations decided to raise their price to $4.45 at the same time so that customers don't have a choice.

Which was the case in this instance. RealPage required subscribers to use their price suggestion some percentage of the time or they'd risk losing their subscription.

What I'm having a hard time understanding is why RealPage cared about "compliance" in the first place - do they charge as a % of rent? That seems nuts, I would imagine landlords hate that.

If not % of rent then I can't understand why the company would want rents to be higher across the board.

IMO, because that way they can claim to landlords they get target ocupancy rates with the higher price; if one landlord in the area knows the price others get, he could try to get higher occupancy rate by lowering his price, aka "competition", by requiring "compliance" to RealPage prices, they are effectively coordinating and price fixing the market, which is the ilegal part. After all, landlords could see regular posing on other channels and adjust their prices in the "normal" way.

Because then they can say “hey landlord, on average if you list through us you can charge X% higher rents than our competitors”

Maybe they want to attract landlords to sign up, and making rent raise works better than any advertisement.

I built software for this industry (not at realpage) for 10+ years and can explain why price compliance is a big deal.

The reason is that there is a fundamental principal vs. agent problem in the fee-based property management industry.

Usually an investor buys a building and then hires a separate corporation called a fee-based property management company to manage the property. The management company gets to keep 8-10% of the rents that come in exchange for doing all the management work. (there are situations where the owner and the manager are the same corporation but they are less common and are called owner-operators)

The fee-based management company and the building owner have different interests. The building owner wants to maximize net operating income, which usually means maximizing revenue. The fee based manager wants to maximize their earnings, which is the 8-10% of the rents minus paying for all the management work to happen.

On first glance you might think these are similar interests, but when it comes to choosing the price they are not the same. If a rental price is optimal, it takes a bit of work to rent it out. The housing unit will sit on the market for a little bit and be shown to a lot of people before you find someone willing to pay the price. If, on the other hand, the price is 10% below the optimal price, it will take very little work to rent out and will be taken by the first person who comes to look at it. In this case "little work" means the management company can save money by paying fewer staff members.

So, property owners want optimal prices and property managers want prices that are slightly lower than that.

Revenue management algorithm compliance is a solution to this principal agent problem. The building owner insists on it being used by the management company because he doesnt trust the management company to choose prices. He doesnt trust the management company to choose the price because they are motivated to lower the price in order to reduce their workload.

High price algorithm compliance is important to realpage because it is how the owner makes sure the manager is choosing prices that maximize the owners interests, rather than the management company's interest. And the owner is the person who chooses to enforce the pricing algorithm, and thus the true customer of realpage when it comes to revenue management algorithms.

Yeah, but listen brother. Do you want housing prices to be lower or higher? Do you want rents to be lower or higher? Which is best for you? What is best for the country? Your experience is really valuable in the context of what this action is meant to address, which is a potentially irreconcilable political interest in low rents for all, high prices for some, low prices for others, which could be achieved many ways.

> the owner is the person who chooses to enforce the pricing algorithm

Very interesting - I can't find anything about this on their website, but assuming that is the case I feel like this is the only explanation so far in this thread that makes sense. Other explanations in this thread (marketing, optimizing for all the customers) fall short to me because (as far as I can tell) there is no reward / punishment mechanism.

This is not to say that the effect isn't the same though, driving prices up. And the other quotes from internal documents certainly hint that there might have been some awareness of this as well.

To the best of my understanding I think the technology does drive up prices, but not in an anticompetitive way. I know people get really passionate about this, so I don't want to argue with people on hacker news about it, but to the best of my understanding this is what is happening:

Rental prices in the USA keep going up primarily due to a housing shortage.

Revenue optimization algorithms like realpage's do genuinely increase rents by about 2-5%, because without them fee-based property managers lower rents below market-clearing price in order to make it easier on themselves.

The increased rent that comes from using these algorithms is, in my opinion, not really anti-competitive. If you only used public information for the pricing algorithm, you'd get largely the same prices out of the system. In almost all rental markets, algorithmic pricing of any sort doesn't have high enough market share to see success by anticompetitive price-fixing, since most suppliers of housing don't use it.

Apartment rents are crazy high because there simply isnt enough housing, and we dont let people build enough dense housing near jobs. Going after Realpage, or blackrock, or landlords, or AirBnB is just trying to find a scapegoat, when the hard truth is we need to let people build more housing near where the jobs are.

do we know roughly how common use of this or similar technologies are in various markets?

I was under the impression this was quite common, though I have no evidence and would love to be shown otherwise!

If it is, they better be covering their tracks.

This definitely requires some citations. There is no evidence that you are presenting that supports the 2-5% claim. I don’t think you are fully understanding the impact of price collusion or the suit presented here. The DOJ very clearly thinks this is anticompetitive.

TBF your contention that the impact of price collusion also requires citations. And the DOJ has thought a lot of things, however their track record in court has been not exactly been stellar so I'm not sure how much of a signal that is.

I suppose only time will tell.

Honestly the strongest argument I've heard that these algorithms are anticompetitive is "The DoJ thinks they are". So maybe there's some non-public information of anticompetitive behavior.

We don't know how many housing units use Realpage pricing algorithms in 2024, but in 2017 when Realpage bought the tech, it was being used in 1.5 million rentals (https://www.realpage.com/news/realpage-to-acquire-lease-rent...) and there were 43 million rentals in the US, which means nationally they had less than 4% marketshare.

Obviously, cartel behavior (raising prices above market) does not work if you have 4% of the market. Perhaps their sales have gone up 20X in 7 years and they have enough market power for cartel behavior (doubtful)? Perhaps they have a low marketshare nationally, but they have a high marketshare in a few specific markets? Maybe, lets see what the DoJ says.

From the press release: "The complaint separately alleges that RealPage has unlawfully maintained its monopoly over commercial revenue management software for multi-family dwellings in the United States, in which RealPage commands approximately 80% market share."

That’s 80% of companies who are using revenue management software are using Realpage, not that 80% of rental units are using Realpage revenue management software

... yeah that's pretty much all of them minus some mom and pops who manage themselves. And from personal experience those mom and pops are selling out to management companies now so a whole neighborhood of single family rentals might be actually controlled by just one or two companies.

That’s seems like an odd anti-competitive complaint considering the customer has the option to not use such software at all?

It’s like complaining about a monopoly on lawn mowing. Owners can always choose to mow their own lawns if they don’t like the cost of hiring it out.

The doj doesn't lose cases like these, and doesn't bring cases that are absolute slam dunks.

"The Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division — for the third time in the span of a year — recently failed to convince a jury that alleged agreements to fix or stabilize labor markets should be punished criminally."

https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2023/04/quarte...

>Perhaps they have a low marketshare nationally, but they have a high marketshare in a few specific markets? Maybe, lets see what the DoJ says.

I think it's very much this. National market share is meaningless. I live in Northern Virginia -- some SFH that rents in another market is meaningless for someone looking for an apartment here. In this area, it seems very much that all large multi-unit apartment buildings use RealPage. Individually owned condos that are rented out exist, but of course their quantity is very tiny compared to the number of apartment towers/complexes. SFHs, likewise, are poor substitutes, because someone in the price range of a studio, 1 or 2 bedroom unit isn't going to rent a SFH and splitting a SFH brings problems of its own.

If this source is correct it’s 7/10 in PHX https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-the-r...

They’re also super glib about it online https://www.realpage.com/analytics/phoenix-apartment-rent-gr...

IMHO automated price raising should be considered problematic or at least suspicious.

False, you are wrong.

Corporate landlords use RealPage in Austin, Minneapolis yet rents fall there because of supply of new housing.

RealPage does impact rental prices, but only marginally, and the real impact to prices is from supply constraint + demand.

If there is enough supply, any realpage algorithm wont matter much because of market forces. Market forces trump everything

> Market forces trump everything

Unless a certain company interferes with market forces — aka the whole purpose of this lawsuit.

If you need a place to live, what’re you going to do, be homeless? They have enough of the market in some cities to impact the market in a way that distorts the prices for everyone. Market forces cannot operate when companies act anticompetitively

I agree that realpage is the villain here, but let's not distract from the real problem.

even if realpage disappears overnight, rent prices wont fall because the new construction is outlawed by the NIMBYs.

fix new construction via zoning reform if you want to actually help people

Supply will never exceed demand by very much because unlike a chair it's a very expensive good to sit on for long. Nobody profits by "overbuilding" so they won't do it nor defect on pricing given a collective target which benefits all owners.

People aren't pool balls bouncing around on a table they are fully capable of serving their interests.

Its weird to argue against the obvious conclusion that price fixing increases price

An anecdote does not prove that RealPage doesn’t have a greater impact in other markets… That’s just not how logic works. You also fail to consider that rents may have fallen further if RealPage was not in use.

Thank you for clear explanation, very interesting

That's my main argument against realtors too -- at first blush they look to have aligned incentives, but the vastly different scales and workloads tend to push realtors into trying to get you to sell for a lower than optimal price.

RealPage's customers are landlords who want to maximize their rent prices. If some landlords look at the data and offer lower prices, that takes business away from the rest of RealPage's customers-- it makes RealPage less valuable for landlords and makes buying into RealPage essentially paying to give up valuable data that other landlords will use against you.

Forcing compliance ensures all of RealPage's customers get to raise their rents while retaining their renters, which means landlords are making a safe bet when using RealPage-- and the only downside is real people paying higher rent.

They need landlords to stick to the numbers they pass on, in order that those numbers remain valuable to all of their other landlord clients.

Suppose that you're a big landlord in some area, such that your submitted prices can affect rents for that property type across the area. You might be tempted to submit high prices, wait for your competitors to follow suit, and then reduce your actual rents to undercut them. They (the competitors) naturally wouldn't be happy with this. So RealPage has to be able to show people that they know their numbers are the actual ones.

Compliance was important because the product (RealPage's AIRM nee YieldStar) works by holding prices higher for longer than the average manager would. The RealPage pricing software is eye-watering expensive and can only be justified if it results in significantly higher revenue.

I don't know about RealPage in particular. But the dynamics could be similar to (or an example of) a cartel.

Cartels generally don't tolerate a cartel member undercutting their prices. Cartels are effectively in a prisoner's dilemma situation:

* If no one defects (i.e. everyone sticks to the cartel price), the cartel members get the highest price, and get the most profits. * If one party defects and goes slightly below the cartel price, while everyone else stays loyal to the cartel pricing, the defecting party gets the most business at a price only slightly below the cartel price, and makes lots of profit. * If all parties defect, there is no cartel any more, and profits are reduced.

So cartel members do not want other cartel members to defect. Cartel organisers get paid because the value of the cartel is only there if defection (i.e. not sticking to the cartel price) is controlled - so it is also in the interest of the organisers to prevent this.

Many listings for apartments are on on-site.com (which is "a RealPage company") and are publicly available...

So it could be argued it's not

"private prices" + "autoaccept" + "compliance"

But rather

"public prices" + "autoaccept" + "compliance"

Still problematic behavior (and probably add "private knowledge of inventory forecast" on top of that), but I'd argue price signaling of the available inventory isn't the main issue.

>So it could be argued it's not "private prices"

I added "private prices" as one of the factors because the official DOJ wording in the complaint mentions "nonpublic/confidential/sensitive" prices in 3 different places:

>The complaint alleges that RealPage contracts with competing landlords who agree to share with RealPage nonpublic, competitively sensitive information about their apartment rental rates

>“We allege that RealPage’s pricing algorithm enables landlords to share confidential, competitively sensitive information and align their rents.

>Landlords agree to share their competitively sensitive data with RealPage in return for pricing recommendations and decisions that are the result of combining and analyzing competitors’ sensitive data. *

I don’t think they’re talking about the price they’re renting the apartment for; I can’t imagine that number is secret in any meaningful sense of the word. Who rents an apartment without knowing the price?

I think they’re talking about more sensitive internal numbers. What are the costs and margins on the unit? How quickly are units moving at a certain price? What’s the turnover at particular prices?

I think the core mechanics bear some similarities to insider trading, with a third party “washing” the non-public information.

Another big one is when do the leases end for inventory control. RealPage is why Apartment dwellers report getting options to renew at cheapest price for odd number of months like 17. Realpage is trying to prevent a bunch of leases ending and flooding the market.

> I think they’re talking about more sensitive internal numbers. What are the costs and margins on the unit? How quickly are units moving at a certain price? What’s the turnover at particular prices?

Yeah that's my understanding of it too "competing landlords who agree to share with RealPage nonpublic, competitively sensitive information about their apartment rental rates and other lease terms".

I.e. realPage has an oracle view of all the lease ending times etc, so it knows for instance, this next July there's going to be very few availability, so boost all the rents by X%

I guess there's a "private price" if the apartment complex share what, after all negotiations, the renter ended up signing for. It can be more than what was on the public website, if they ended up signing for a shorter lease, or less if the apartment ended up needing to throw in "first month free" etc.

There's also private price of lease renewals done before the unit is put for rent on the website.

There is more than just pricing at question here. If you go to your typical local gas station with a 5000 gallon tank and fill up the station will raise their prices above the other stations in the area because they will only have a small amount of gas in their tanks and so they want everyone to go elsewhere until the next delivery fills the tanks up again. (depending on when you fill up the station may not even have 5000 gallons in their tanks.) How much tank is left at any station is NOT public information shared with other stations in the area.

RealPage though has information on how many apartments are empty and uses that in algorithms even though it isn't public information.

>are publicly available

The list price is different than the final accepted monthly rate\term for the renter. Realpage is getting the actual rental information.

In addition, the occupancy of the building is also not public data.

The Blue Book is a great example because the number is so often discarded in almost all sales.

Another example would be stock trading apps, especially ones that give you forecasts and estimates as to when to buy and sell.

I think the major differentiator here is that in the examples provided, everyone has access ( even if it is for a price ). When it comes of equifac work number or realpage data, it seems to be available to only a subset of population, which is problematic. I want to know what a given corporation is paying.

Recently in used car shopping i've found KBB only gets used when they are pricing trade ins but the cars for sale on the lot have been much higher than the book value and they scoff when you ask them to come down to the KBB used car value that matches, no wonder so many car lots are closing shop.

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