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Findeton

25b in assets, so that's less than 0.1% of all properties in Canada. And they say they're rigging prices? How so?

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> 0.1% of all properties

How do you convert an amount of money into a number of registered properties ?

You divide it by the valuation of all real estate and get a percentage of all properties by value (not count).

I think the GP used ~6.1 trillion as that value, or maybe some number related to rental stock valuation. The <0.1% looks approximately correct.

So, basically he didn't land on a count.

I'm not sure why we should care about the share of money they command, as it could have nothing to do with whether they're dominant or not, depending on how skewed the market it.

PS: to note, I was commenting on the process, but on the deeper point, Dream Unlimited is only one of the company caught in this, so we could have any number of other developpers roped in at a later date. I think we really don't have any idea how widespread the issue is.

You dont need to, it cancels out on both sides of the equation.

Pick any number for average cost of a property, and its still only 0.1% of all properties.

If you had a distribution of prices, or even at least a median price I'd see it. But averaging it all tells us almost nothing.

Using RealPage software which is a Texas company that gathers information from landlords to then recommend prices that the landlords should then use.

So it’s not so much the company itself optimizing based on its own data but the argument goes, at least per the antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, that the landlords are all colluding together via an intermediary.

If they are really good at colluding, why are prices higher in LA than in Houston?

I think RealPage and similar systems probably add a few percentage points to rents - and if you consider how much money that is across 1000's of renters, it's worth suing them over.

But supply and demand are still the gorilla in the room.

For one, LA is generally a more wealthy area which means it can support higher rents. For another, it depends on the utilization rate of the software in a locale. And finally, let’s say it raises rents by 10% — if rents started out higher in LA they would remain higher.

I really don’t understand your question.

Yes supply and demand are the gorillas, but pricing collusion like this has always generally been illegal regardless of the size of the effect so I don’t understand your point.

The point is that high rents are caused by an imbalance of supply and demand.

You can ask as much as people are able to pay. You need a very large abundance for prices to drop and then they drop like a brick.

Rents are going down in places that have built more, lead by Austin, TX:

https://www.threads.net/@davidnwelton/post/C_T1ADRyAMi?xmt=A...

Markets are competitive, even with RealPage, so you can't really just "ask as much as people will pay", just like you can't at the grocery store either.

imagine they had 100m in assets. 100m is either 333 houses priced at 300k or 1 building priced at 100m. On top of that, owning 333 houses in 1 neighbourhood is very different to owning 1 house each in 333 neighbourhoods.

Property markets are usually segmented locally. A real estate portfolio with that valuation can move the needle in a city or neighborhood.

All the other comments aside, the idea that less than 0.1% but more than 0.01% is somehow "not a lot" when 100% is an entire country is baffling. You know that even fractional percentages translates to huge absolute numbers when you're starting with millions, right?

If you see "it only inconveniences forty thousand people" and think "well yeah, it's only forty thousand, that's a small number", you don't understand numbers. Even at just over 0.01%, that's five thousand lives being controlled to the point of being held hostage by one company.

No Canadian should accept that as "this is fine and normal and fair".

They are using software that acts as a middleman / coordinator across a bunch of different landlords to fix prices

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