The FBI's recent raid on Cortland Management reveals a nationwide conspiracy to inflate rents, potentially impacting millions of renters, including those in Rhode Island. Discover how RealPage's software allegedly manipulates rental markets and what this could mean for your rent.
This will mean nothing for us renters, long term. Other software that achieves similar outcomes exists and the massive corporations that have swept up huge portions of the rental market are all using them. We need legislation to solve this problem and our government is incapable of passing such.
I wouldn’t be so quick to write this off. The software that is overwhelmingly dominant here is RealPage, which is allowing landlords to act as a cartel to set prices. This isn’t just about taking down realpage, it’s also potentially about setting a precedent about using software to obscure cartel price fixing behavior.
remember that webpage what tracked the price of eggs at walmart? It went up, there was randomness and noise, and a day later all the walmarts were using it to homogenize their prices. I’m kind of surprised they hadn’t been doing something like that already, but perhaps explicit price fixing between stores in a chain is too monopolistic for the DOJ I’m a title 26 guy.
I highly doubt Walmart didn’t already know the price of eggs in each store. They probably evened it out to prevent people from just going to the cheapest nearest store just for eggs. (Even though I’m sure most people would also have bought other grocery items at the same time, but Walmart doesn’t usually think past the first few bucks.)
It wasn’t us, the AI did it.
Makes sense, the police exist to protect the assets of the rich and powerful. Everything else they do is a side hustle to justify their authority.
Now, some of that side hustle may be necessary to society but it’s always been just that.
The true benefit of AI is removing culpability.
There is a difference: data. Other software doesn’t have data on what apartments are empty and what they are all renting for. They can only get data on the one landlord (even if they have more than one landlord in the system they cannot combine the data for the two). The know how many apartments one landlord has free, but not what others might have - only what they advertise. They don’t know what other landlords are really charging, only what they are advertising they charge (which might be different). This lack of data means software cannot find the best possible rate for the landlord - instead each landlord has to guess what is best.