- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- A group of lawsuits accuse large landlords of price-fixing the market rate of rent in the United States
- A complaint filed by Washington D.C.’s Attorney General alleges 14 landlords in the district are sharing competitively sensitive data through RealPage, a real estate software provider
- RealPage recommends prices for roughly 4.5 million housing units in the United States
- RealPage told CNBC that its landlord customers are under no obligation to take their price suggestions
A group of renters in the U.S. say their landlords are using software to deliver inflated rent hikes.
“We’ve been told as tenants by employees of Equity that the software takes empathy out of the equation. So they can charge whatever the software tells them to charge,” said Kevin Weller, a tenant at Portside Towers since 2021.
Tenants say the management started to increase prices substantially after giving renters concessions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This isn’t a data scraping site. Clients uploaded their rental data to the site directly, and then the site “compares them” and tells the clients what to charge. It also explicitly requires all clients to follow its pricing “recommendations” to maintain those prices.
These landlords outsourced pricing collision to a 3rd party. They formed a monopoly with software and cost their tenats 100s of millions extra in doing so.
I’ve worked within multiple sfr companies over the past 8 years. Including with their product teams building out in house acquisitions and asset management platforms to quickly aggregate comps for rental and sale values. While what you’re saying may be true, there is a lot more beneath the surface. To be clear, institutional single family landlords should be legislated out of existence, but to you and everyone downvoting, you don’t get the big picture here.