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RealPage rent-pricing case wraps with nearly $360M to renters

52 points raybb 4 hours ago 15 comments

rabidheuristics 1 hour ago | parent

“None of the companies admitted fault or liability. They did, however, agree to stop providing Realpage with their nonpublic data for use as an input in Realpage’s revenue management system’s price recommendations, and to stop using Realpage’s RMS in ways that use competitors’ non-public data to inform pricing recommendations”.

Okay but Realpage has a decade of real pricing data that it can use to continue informing these rental companies and outside of them having extremely hard boundaries in their service this is just going to happen again.

This doesn’t do a whole lot to address the actual issue, and these companies aren’t going to stop colluding over a wrist slap like this.

exabrial 1 hour ago | parent

_thats it_ ???

georgel 1 hour ago | parent

I filed my claim, and based on their calculator this might be the most serious check from a class action (assuming I get the full amount). For me its ~1.5k between 3 named landlords.

jadenPete 53 minutes ago | parent

Where is this calculator?

georgel 16 minutes ago | parent

There is no calculator per se, in the settlement they explain the formula for payouts.

throwitaway222 1 hour ago | parent

I've been saying this for a while, but there is a cottage industry like RealPage in pretty much every industry. These companies need to be slammed out of existence for anti-competitive pricing and collusion. So much corruption. I'm so sick of fraud and corruption.

epistasis 1 hour ago | parent

We need a public rental registry of rental prices that anybody can browse, analyze, etc. The information disparity is a problem.

However, that's not a systematic method for lower prices. It just prevents individual cases of price gouging.

lotsofpulp 1 hour ago | parent

I don’t see why rental agreements can’t be registered with the county like house sales are. It would also eliminate the need for squatter laws, as it would be trivial for police to pull up the county website and see who belongs in the home.

zhivota 51 minutes ago | parent

Americans are too privacy focused to accept this, but I could easily see a cottage industry of "registered agents" popping up around it who sign leases on behalf of individuals and shield them from public scrutiny.

Alternatively we could keep the names private. A cryptographic solution would easily serve the need of authorities verifying the right person is in a place without identification, but good luck figuring out how to ensure the tenant has their keys somehow since in the US there are zero pieces of identification you can ensure every citizen has.

tmpz22 18 minutes ago | parent

Are we privacy focused? Look at products like Facebook Muse, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Whatsapp, or the perv glasses, or or or

georgel 14 minutes ago | parent

See RealID for how long certain states has been kicking that bucket down the road.

Onavo 26 minutes ago | parent

Well, a Torrens registry systems still isn't universal yet in the US.

kdot 43 minutes ago | parent

Al la dc rent registry, which I always thought was ironic because doesn’t this create a database where landlords can consider prices based on others… but I guess it would be public in this case.

https://rentregistry.dc.gov/

Onavo 30 minutes ago | parent

Well the point of market based interventions and government regulations like this is primarily to reduce information asymmetry. You still ultimately need to increase supply or reduce demand to move price.

jmyeet 24 minutes ago | parent

It's both funny and sad to see the mental gymnastics of people trying to find solutions to this when the solution is real simple: it's public ownership.

Housing needs to be decommodified. It needs to stop being a retirement plan. We need to stop letting people hoard it. We need to stop subsidizing exurbs and making it illegal to build the kind of walkable communities people actually like. Case in point: Red Vienna [1].

As another commenter noted, this is in every industry. Utilities are a particularly bad one including telcos. All the best ISPs in the US are municipally owned. Chattanooga was the first really big poster child for this.

Privatization of all these things is just rent-seeking behavior.

So many of society's problems come down to housing being too expensive. Anything that makes it expensive needs to be stamped out and that includes RealPage as well as Airbnb/VRBO.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY&t=191s