U.S. landlords who use RealPage products to set prices on rental apartments are facing accusations of collusion.
  • 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.

  • NeatoEnglish
    7•5 months ago

    OK. What does someone do when they move somewhere new and can’t afford to purchase a house? Or don’t want to purchase a place because they expect to live somewhere 6-12mo for a contract?

    • @GoodbyeBlueMondayEnglish
      5•5 months ago

      The solutions I’ve seen require a fundamental rethinking of the way housing works in the USA (and most places), where renting just turns into another way to build some amount of equity, and the property managers are under more democratic control. More of the process subsidized by the local government, in the same way that water treatment is.

      Arguably it’s renting by another name, but the central point is to strip the profit motive out of it (some salaries are needed, but in a system with more regulatory oversight) and to allow the renter to get some financial benefit so they aren’t simply pissing money away.

      Apologies in advance for that vague response: I’m not an economist or real estate expert, so I can’t back up that general idea with any kind of details or evidence it’s feasible.

      • NeatoEnglish
        2•5 months ago

        Yeah, I agree totally. That’s a great idea. Lease-to-own or something similar. As a renter I’d love to build some form of equity. Because in the US the only real way to build equity or generational wealth is through owning property. Which makes real estate a VERY hot commodity to speculate in. Which is a huge problem for people who just want somewhere to live and built modest equity like everyone else has.

    • @novibe@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4•5 months ago

      Public housing, rented at cost directly from the government. And you can stay in the house as long as you want, so it eliminates the “risk” of renting. Done. Solved it.

      Now just fucking build some public housing please.

      • NeatoEnglish
        1•5 months ago

        I think this is a good idea for public housing. BUT that is not what the vast majority of americans want to live in. Uniform apartments, townhomes or small single-family homes are not the norm and I’d hesitate to make the majority of future developments so homogenous.

        And then you have the issue with government-provided housing as we’ve had in the past: underfunding, under policing, bad locations, NIMBY assholes, etc. We already have subsidized housing/rental assistance: Section 8. So this would be a constant battle to just keep it decent.

        • @novibe@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2•5 months ago

          Public housing doesn’t need to be uniform or boring… that was mostly a result of the ideology of urban planners of the mid 20th century when most public housing projects happened. The government can contract a private developer to make a nice building, that is well located, and is not just for poor people. That seems so obvious, but it seems people are stuck by their own ideology and can’t even think a bit outside of what is, or has been.

          And I’m not talking about subsidised, I mean PUBLIC. Owned by the government or by coops, councils etc. Built using federal money. Just having this around would decrease overall housing costs so much… the market would have to compete with the no-profit, cost only, rents of public housing.

          And Amazon has done a lot of research and found you only need to control 8% of a market to control the pricing. The government just has to build enough public housing in major population centers facing rent crisis to own 8% of total housing there. And that’s it. Rent cost crisis averted. And thousands of jobs and GDP generated because of all the construction (add in extra infrastructure for better access to the public housing, and you got a real economic boom cooking — hint hint, it’s literally what China did lmao).