I saw RealPage's crappy rent-jacking-up software so you don't have to

By whom? It's rather ambiguous (as is so oftent he case with the passive voice), I can see how you and the other person drew different interpretations.

It's difficult to imagine a reason why a property owner should have to appeal to "management" to vary the prices of their own asset that doesn't involve "management" being an cartel body.

Still, the impression given to the property's management team is that a person (possibly a customer service grunt) is doing some kind of "final review," manually clicking a box or even just making sure they don't drop below 80% acceptance.

> Specifically, every morning, RealPage provides participating Lessors with recommended price levels. Lessors typically must communicate to a RealPage “Pricing Advisor” that they have “accept[ed]” or “confirm[ed] the “approved pricing” within a specified time frame. If Lessors wish to diverge from the “approved pricing” they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval. RealPage encourages participating Lessors to have daily calls between the Lessors’ employees with pricing responsibility and the RealPage Pricing Advisor.

So every day an employee at the Lessor must tell a Pricing Advisor -- a flesh-and-blood RealPage employee -- that they accept the pricing provided by RealPage. Further, to reject the pricing, they must explain to the Pricing Advisor why they are rejecting the pricing in writing.

It IS confusing because it goes on to say in the following paragraph that said requests also require further approval from a manager at the Lessor.

Also, as other comments said, it incentivizes increased density.

It incentivizes multi-unit construction, as the more productive the land is, the less onerous the land taxes become. (Wheres currently, developing land normally increases the property tax.)

Increasing units per land both provides more housing, and reduces the tax/renter pass through.

It disincentivizes holding unproductive land as an investment, since unproductive land gets taxed as highly as productive land.

Removing the dysfunctional use of land as a store of value asset, would greatly reduce land and rent prices.

Removing the store of value aspect, would also better align landlords incentives with their renters. As their business model would now purely revolve around their paying customers, without the subsidy of land prices going up due to investment mania. And improving rental properties would be cheaper, without the tax increases that entails today.

All these benefits probably accrue from good economic alignment, because a land tax, instead of total property value tax, reflects that it is land, not its development, which is the finite resource.

Land is finite, yet we all absolutely need land, along with food, air, and water. (Finite in a soft way, given different land is more or less usable). We only "own" land in passing. So those holding it shouldn't be lightly excluding better uses of an absolutely necessary resource.

Land taxes are also morally well aligned. It is land (not development) that is a joint inheritance to us all. Land owners share a bit of that inheritance value with all of us, while still being allowed to manage it according to self-interest, opportunity and competition.

Finally, property tax is part land tax, part wealth (development value) tax. Only taxing land eliminates a wealth tax. Upgrading your home won't increase your taxes.

The humanitarian and economic benefits of properly aligned land taxes would directly accrue to everyone in society from the bottom to the top.

It would improve overall economic efficiency and equality.

It would eliminate a lot of local and national political conflicts.

No, this is not how this works. Rent is set by demand and (very insufficient) supply.

If landlord could increase rent by $X - they would have increased it already (software in TFA speeds up the process, but doesn't set market clearing price). A simple thought experiment would be something akin "98% tax on rental income". "Pass it to renter" would imply 50x increase in rent to preserve existing income.

Bottom line: make it easier to build more housing. it doesn't have to be subsidized/affordable/below market rate[0]. Any addition of units has downward effect on rent across all range of prices.

[0] > [In Helsinki] The supply of new market rate units triggers moving chains that quickly reach middle- and low-income neighborhoods and individuals. Thus, new market-rate construction loosens the housing market in middle- and low-income areas even in the short run.

From "City-wide effects of new housing supply: Evidence from moving chains" https://ideas.repec.org/p/fer/wpaper/146.html

First of all, no one is going to benefit if 25% of US population moves to NYC.

Second, if we build millions of houses and they stay vacant, we just wasted a ton of money.

Third, if we just give away all those houses for free, we're going to destroy the real estate market, which will have a cascading effect and cause a huge crisis in all sectors (and if you think that only billionaires will be affected, think harder).

Fourth, due to misaligned incentives, governments are known to be way less efficient than private companies.

So our best option is to be smart: build only so many houses to meet the demand and so that the utility they provide is roughly equal to their cost, and let private companies build those houses. Now we only need two things: a tool to measure the utility of something, and some incentives for private companies.

I guess we all know where this is going.

The problem with using 'capitalism' in discussions like this is that there isn't a precise definition of it. To some people it simply means private ownership of the means of production, to others in includes free trade, to others (and to my thinking, the most precise, but YMMV) its about the separation of management and ownership and tradable claims on the firm.

Yeah, I can't imagine there would be any unintended consequences to that.

In what world does raising the cost of providing housing cause landlords to reduce rents? More likely it causes landlords to stop renting. See the consequences of the rent control regulations in NYC, for example.

The government enforces capitalism laws (rather than socialist or chartalist) so how do you distinguish?

[1] https://livebaltimore.com/neighborhoods/madison-eastend/

But who buys the government?

"""One night, on my way home from work, I pushed the wrong elevator button and got out on the floor below mine without realizing it. My key wouldn’t fit the lock to what I had assumed was my door, so I turned the knob and stepped, to my astonishment, into a completely empty, totally untouched one-bedroom. I turned around and beelined to the elevator, worried that I’d get busted for trespassing, when I noticed strips of masking tape covering the door frames on all of the other (presumably empty) apartments on the floor.

This was how I became aware of “warehousing,” the practice by which landlords keep unrented apartments off the market to create artificial scarcity. Building owners have always done this, especially in new constructions with lots of virgin inventory, because why give renters the upper hand if they don’t have to?

But they really started doing it during the pandemic. On a 2022 episode of the real-estate-industry podcast Talking Manhattan, Gary Malin, COO of the Corcoran Group, made a surprising claim: “At one point during the downturn, the vacancy rate in the city was close to 25 percent,” he said. “You had owners who were sitting on hundreds if not thousands of empty apartments.”"""

If there are extremely wealthy entities that can afford to soak up enough supply to meaningfully impact market prices, making it easier to build new housing is likely part of the equation, but it may not be the silver bullet. I don't know how many units are held unoccupied, but as someone from Detroit, I'd advise against letting supply get too far ahead of demand (Context: a major housing surplus developed in Detroit as the population dropped from ~2M in 1960 to ~0.6M today, and this surplus destroyed the value of homeowner's equity and lead to abandonment, blight, and massive arson rates).

What we have is a complete lack of top-down management to allocate it efficiently.

If we combined Soviet economics and modern Big Data, we could solve this easily-- mandate that economic engines are sited where housing gluts exist, and assign out housing to optimize things like average commute length.

The interesting part is who those men with guns are accountable to.

Internet commenters love to group opinions into a camp and then call them hypocritical. (Ex: capitalists love rent market manipulation but hate unions, those hypocrites!)

Of course, that’s not true, most capitalists would not want price fixing - something generally done under centralized planned economies.

I understand there's no way to 100% guarantee such actions will be punished, if it does occur, but clearly it's already not accepted by society.

That currently legal actions such as raising prices because a brand wants to move up-market should be made illegal?

I suggest you to get out of your first-world bubble. Somehow you seem to think that everyone is entitled to luxury.

> The percent of people’s average income spent on most sectors has gone up over time.

First of all, that's a weird statement. The percent of people average income spent on most sectors is close to 100%. Ratios will change, but they don't indicate anything if you don't know how to read them.

What's your interpretation of this graph? Is it "billionaires are making movies more expensive and people are forced to save on food"?

https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58367/food-prices_fi...

Half kidding, half not.

But even then, I wouldn't be surprised at all if had your grandparents suddenly had 20% more money their spending on Sees would have gone up by more than 20%.

In economics, a luxury good (or upmarket good) is a good for which demand increases more than what is proportional as income rises, so that expenditures on the good become a greater proportion of overall spending. Luxury goods are in contrast to necessity goods, where demand increases proportionally less than income.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_goods

The US Government sets policy all the time that hurts people who own stocks and bonds. And mostly people are fine with that. I don't see why home owners ought to be afforded a special level of protection for their investment.

Instead of being able to fit a single house worth an imputed rent of $1000 on your lot, you'd instead be able to fit a duplex, renting for $600 + $600 = $1200. If supply has increased so much to lower equivalent rents a whopping 40%, then you're probably looking at a situation more like now being able to build a quadplex or small six-unit apartment building on your lot. At $600 x 4 = $2400 or $600 x 6 = $3600 you've actually seen the value of your land double or triple in this scenario.

In this hypothetical scenario you'll now have so much extra money, that you could easily move to more expensive, quieter neighborhood that hasn't been upzoned yet. If you're lucky, you'll be able to repeat the process there as well.

The safety of HDBs, apart from reflecting Singapore's low crime rate in general, also reflects Singapore not having the idea that high rise government housing projects are somewhere only the poor and desperate would want to live and their condition a reflection of Singapore not having the belief that government budgets are things to be slashed....

Neoconservatism is a hell of a drug.

Wouldn't matter for the areas that could actually use more housing (dense urban ares), but there is an extremely strong anti-government streak in the U.S.

I think you might be right, it just doesn't seem obvious to me.

I'm sorry you felt I shat on your idea. I was actually very interested in it. My contribution to the conversation was critical, but not intended to be dismissive. I thought it was a great question and a topic I'm interested in & think about often. So I formed a substantive comment expressing my thoughts on it.

I'm sorry this was a frustrating experience for you. If there's something I could have done differently (other than just stay silent) to make it more clear that I thought this was a good discussion or to be clearer, please let me know, and I'll consider it going forward.

How did they do it? The major companies asserted “increasing central control over the creative process”[352] through deliberate creation and extensive promotion of new groups, long-range contracts for groups, and reduced autonomy for producers. In addition, legal and illegal promotion costs (drug payola to disc jockeys, for example) rose in the competitive race and now exceeded the resources of small independents. Finally, the majors “have also moved to regain a controlling position in record distribution by buying chains of retail stores.”[353] The diversity is still greater than it had been in the past, and may remain high, but it is ominous that the majors have all the segments covered. As an executive said, “Columbia Records will have a major entry into whatever new area is broached by the vagaries of public tastes.” But for a concentrated industry, the “vagaries of public tastes” are not economical; it is preferable to stabilize and consolidate them. This would be possible through further control over the creative process and marketing.

That is:

- Market concentration, when disrupted, eventually re-emerged.

- The result was that "'vagaries of public tastes' are not economical", and that media power prefers to direct rather than follow these.

- That numerous mechanisms for subverting public preference and market mechanisms emerged.

Those with power virtually always want more, particularly when viewed through that favourite economist lens, expressed preferences. But there are market structures in which those powers are capable of expressing that desire, most especially in monpolised media, and those in which they are not ... usually small-scale businesses with low barriers to entry and high mobility costs. Classic exemplars are personal and on-site services (plumbing, electrical, hair and nail salons, much healthcare), commodities which are not easily light-weighted, such as milk, concrete, and structural stone, high-touch services, and the like.

Understanding that there are economic segments which do repeatedly manifest with highly-centralised monopolies, such as recorded music, broadcast media, and software and online services, is a useful and powerful mental model, in my experience.

In the case of real estate, the underlying commodity (land) is not portable, but it correlates strongly to other non-portable phenomena (employment, residence, education, general services, recreation & entertainment, education), and frequently extracts much of the surplus value of those attributes for itself, without having meaningfully contributed to their provisioning or existence in the first place.