U.S. Plans to Accuse Software Maker of Enabling Collusion on Rents
www.nytimes.com
The Justice Department is set to file an antitrust suit against the real estate company RealPage alleging illegal price-fixing facilitated by algorithms.

RealPage, maker of YieldStar, is almost singlehandedly the ones causing rent to skyrocket across much of the United States.

One of the algorithm’s developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had “too much empathy” compared to computer generated pricing.

You can learn more about them here and why this antitrust case is so important:

https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent

  • booly
    3·
    4 months ago

    The a few accusations that make this worse, and probably illegal if proven:

    • This software doesn’t just use public data. It uses the private data of multiple landlords who submit their private/proprietary data to be used by all the competitors.
    • The software, and the company’s contracts, prevent the landlords from actually deviating from the formula, through a combination of a hostile interface and contractual requirements.
    • The software encourages landlords to do non-pricing activity, like taking units off the market, to feed into the algorithm for everyone else.