Hacker News Reader

They are only able to do this price fixing because of the scarcity of housing right now. If much more housing is built, prices will drop.

View on HN

I don't think this is true - for one, housing in the US isn't all that scarce (~14M vacant units) [1], and housing doesn't behave like most markets vis a vis supply / demand - there are too many confounding factors and it's not exactly a liquid market.

This would also make sense given that this algorithmic pricing platform is used by so many clients. If just enough real estate firms can maximize their profits in this way, they can afford to buy out anyone who might compete on price.

1 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EVACANTUSQ176N

I'd be curious to see where these 14 million vacant units are located. It's quite likely that the majority of them would be located in places where people do not want to live.

Right, but that's part of the problem - just being able to build more houses isn't going to solve problems for, say, NY or LA where it's not an issue of how many units but an issue of pricing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com