Matt Stoller sometimes bears down hard on companies that are just natural monopolies like Google. Gaining most of the customers by providing the best service is honest competition, not predation.
This time he’s found a nasty mob-style predator. The feds and some states are suing a software company called RealPage that coordinates rentals among the corporate landlords
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How does the cartel allegedly work? Well large corporate landlords, who would normally compete with one another for tenants via price or quality, have since 2016 stopped doing so. Instead, they all share “detailed real-time data regarding pricing, inventory, occupancy rates, and unit types that are or will be coming available to rent” every day with one another through RealPage’s revenue management system, which in turn sends back recommendations on pricing.
Landlords adopt RealPage recommendations on pricing 80-90% of the time, which explicitly drives up revenue by holding apartments off the market. As the architect of RealPage once explained, “If you have idiots undervaluing, it costs the whole system.” It’s not just an information-sharing and price recommendation engine. RealPage has ‘pricing advisors’ that monitor landlords and encourage them to accept suggested pricing, it works to get employees at landlord companies fired who try to move rents lower, and it even threatens to drop clients who don’t accept its high price recommendations.
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Classic mob protection racket, not just a monopoly. “Idiots undervaluing” is the definition of honest competition as seen from the viewpoint of a criminal.
Why in the holy fuck are the Dems totally ignoring their own anti-monopoly action? The stock and trade regulators have been working hard on several fronts, and this particular front affects the most serious economic problem. When Dems screech about bizarre lunacy like “democracy”, sane people ignore them. “Democracy” doesn’t pay the rent. Suing the company that raises the rent is genuine problem-solving along the same lines as the New Deal. FDR would approve.
Polistra's Mill 