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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

This is not a significant phenomenon driving rent increases. You make more money if you defect from this arrangement and real estate holdings remain diversified in America.

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If a landlord's vacancy rate is lower than the "don't defect" rent increase, then he makes more money by not defecting.

Also - setting rent in a given market is a game that the same landlords play with each other, annually. Strategy is different in multi-round games.

And - back in the 1990's, I knew a few residential landlords in a mid-sized college town. They clearly said that they got together annually, and decided how much to increase their rents.

I don't agree that rental markets can be modeled as an annual multi-round game/sequential auction and would love a cite and how that proves collusion in these markets.

People want a boogeyman so badly

https://twitter.com/PEWilliams_/status/1610126249938092033

I may be misunderstanding the chart, but it says it misses cash offers on second home purchases. All-cash purchases are on the rise since 2008, so that seems like a pretty large segment that isn't represented.

Half of the large apartment complexes in my city are owned by the same corporation. They don't even have to collude to set rent, because they are all the same entity.

What city?

Not if the group colluding collectively control the vast majority of the market. (>70% in some Seattle neighborhoods are colluding with this software.)

70% in one neighborhood when only counting apartments with more than 10 units (the vast minority of units).

Not good, certainly, but absolutely in no way driving the current rental crisis.

It's multiple neighborhoods all next to each other in Seattle. They are absolutely contributing to the rental crisis in Seattle proper.

I just rented an apartment in Seattle and was surprised by the apparently high vacancies (many units in buildings we looked at were not rented but also not on the market).

Would love to learn more about this software.

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