> Then rents will start rising even more. Landlords will be willing to do price discovery the old fashioned way, offering it with a high rent and letting the unit stay vacant until someone pays it.

And you fix this with a vacancy tax--which we should have whether this kind of collusion is true or not.

Quite often, commercial entities holding apartment complexes are willing to let a property sit vacant because they can tack that onto the end of the financing while accepting lower rent would reset the basis of the financing agreement and force them to cough up cash.

A vacancy tax puts the kibosh on this kind of behavior.