Readit Newslsmeducation commented on Sam Bankman-Fried and other FTX staff allegedly had 'Wirefraud' chat group (2022) theguardian.com/business/... · Posted by u/bitcharmer
These people partied a lot.
I thought what they did was this:
Get Apartment A to raise rents and enforce these increased rates.
Then go to Apartment B and say “look you gotta raise your prices to the market rate, apartment A is doing it so you can too”.
Then go back to A and say “hey the market can bear this price, why don’t you raise your rent?”
They also encourage owners to keep units vacant (which they should be able to afford if they’re getting prices to go up) rather than rent at a cheaper price.
So this feels like collusion to me. But they also say “Everything we do is legal!” - and if that’s the case we need better laws and regulation to avoid this type of behavior. It’s like a distributed cartel - you can’t charge SF rates in Baltimore but what if you could get Baltimore rates to go up by X% YoY with this tactic? Seems unfair.
And higher rent means the valuation of the property goes up. All the incentives are there for them to do this, we just all need to really convince ourselves they would never do such a thing.
...
I had to read through some of the actual complaint to see what the deal was. The allegation is that RealPage did not just provide pricing data, but went to great lengths, including hiring secret shoppers, to enforce that housing companies not deviate from their price. This would appear, if true, to be a clear violation of antitrust law. This of course comes down to whatever is demonstrated in court to be true.
These companies don't care. A lot of these tenant management companies do legal grey area things and landlords pay for it (even though it's begging to be tackled). A good example is they keep tenant blacklists based on scraped court records [1]. Landlords are not supposed to be using stuff like this. I wouldn't have imagined they are price fixing too.
To remain in compliance with the law, OAG recommends landlords and property owners refrain from requesting a potential tenant’s court records and rental histories altogether and cease relationships with tenant screening bureaus who continue to provide court records. Any New Yorker who believes that they have been denied an apartment because of their rental history should submit a tenant blacklisting complaint online with OAG.
In its investigation of Clipper Equity, OAG determined the company had improperly obtained housing court records for 25 potential tenants and then denied housing to seven of those same applicants. The OAG found that Clipper thus violated the law. Clipper also violated city and state Human Rights laws by requiring potential tenants to disclose their marital status. As part of the agreement, Clipper Equity will take the necessary steps to comply with the laws it broke and has committed to ending its discriminatory screening policies.
[1] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2022/attorney-general-james-...
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Rich people can still stand out with their fancy watches & flashy sun glasses. Shelter shouldn't be a status symbol.
And I'd even add that shelter is also one of those things we shouldn't just let the free market sort out (as it has been, and we all see how that's been going).
I wonder if there is upward pressure on housing prices due to Zillow's Zestimate feature? Or on used car prices due to Kelley Blue Book?
They mostly just look at most recent sales in the area. It sounds simple, but can be bewildering. Just because everyone gobbled up mortgages at low interest rates in 2020, does not mean you can keep pricing houses at 2020 levels. But that's exactly what the housing market keeps doing because they simply care about the last max bid/sale.
What about the time component? Holding a market wide price even for a month can demoralize anyone into accepting the rent if you need to move in a month. Time pressure is the multiplier here. You cannot wait out being homeless by being combative against unreasonable rent.
At what point can a hostile housing market be considered a discrimination issue (on financial basis)?
I wonder if the laws will be written in a way that we can get around them by just dropping the “AI” marketing fluff and saying that we’re building some ML/stats system.
I'm just using a hash map to count the number of word occurrences
We're gonna need a RICO statute to go after these algos in the long run.