We need a public rental registry of rental prices that anybody can browse, analyze, etc. The information disparity is a problem.
However, that's not a systematic method for lower prices. It just prevents individual cases of price gouging.
However, that's not a systematic method for lower prices. It just prevents individual cases of price gouging.
There is enough turnover with new listings to find the market rate while preventing existing tenants from being screwed over by unreasonable prices.
Australia also almost entirely works off rentals owned by individuals who own 1-3 properties rather than corporate owners so no one landlord has any sway over the market.
I think this narrative is just meant to distract people from questioning the necessity of the landlord class, they want people angry at a faceless corporate boogieman instead of local landlords (for obvious reasons)
What else do you expect "collective bargaining" to do in a market where every tenant has a different landlord? Your landlord isn't going to care if the tenants of 10,000 other landlords threaten to move out. They only care if you threaten to move out, and then to credibly do that what you need is to show them the unit you could move into which is asking for less.
The real problem is that you need the unit you can threaten to move into to first exist, rather than its construction being inhibited by zoning etc.
How is that collective bargaining when your neighbors have different landlords?
All you're suggesting is to stop paying rent, which anybody can do on their own, with the usual consequences of your credit getting ruined and then the landlord serves you an eviction notice and changes the locks.
Consider the economics of what you're suggesting. Your unit costs $800k when it should cost $200k because of artificial scarcity (zoning), so then the landlord has to pay $800k for it and charge rents high enough to pay back that loan. The way you fix that is by getting the cost of the unit back down to where it should be, i.e. building more units to alleviate the scarcity.
Demanding that the landlords charge less without reducing what they have to pay for the building doesn't work, because then who is going to sink $800k to build a new rental unit? Who is going to keep renting out their existing units at a loss instead of turning them into condos or similar? Which then makes the scarcity of rental units worse and causes rents to go up.
You can't solve a supply problem by bargaining with someone the law still effectively prohibits from increasing supply.
Of course, if there are improvements in the rental, you can go beyond the index as the property been "improved", but it's really handy to know each year that it's limited and the exact amount. For 2026 it's locked to 2.14% for example, for everyone.
Second, the historical database should be deleted. And if they can't survive that, so be it. Keeping the spoils of crime should be the crime. Justice still isn't finished.
The theory says that new units are added when prices are high and building new units is practical. Building new units is inhibited, therefore prices go up, exactly according to the theory.
The problem isn't the theory, it's the inhibiting of adding more units.
There's been an assertion of a "body of literature" but no pointers to it, no assessment of the data quality, no assessment of the validity of the interpretations, etc.
There are entire bodies of literature based on zero evidence, due to epistemic doubt about evidence as grounds. For example, critical geography actively rejects basing their body of literature on evidence, and reaches conclusions about gentrification and displacement and housing production that are quite contrary to both the evidence and standard economic theory. Yet the work of critical geographers is endemic in public policy around urban planning and political debates on housing production in urban areas.
I would agree in general that theory must change to match the evidence, but again, what evidence is at play in any of this thread?
The existing price is high not because it should cost that much to create a new unit. It's because you're only allowed to put one unit on a particular plot of land, which makes the land cost per unit 10x as high as building 10 units there. Adding more units doesn't require you to use lower quality materials or similar, it just requires you to actually build them.
This is trivial to empirically disprove. Look at the listings for similar units in an arbitrary city. Are they all exactly the same price? No, and then the landlord who offers the lower price for an otherwise equivalent unit fills their vacancy sooner.
> They raise rents in lockstep and then offer "specials" like a month off (amortized) that lower initial out-of-pocket costs without affecting the base rent, which gets raised on subsequent lease renewals to make up the difference.
These are obviously gimmicks, but who is requiring you to fall for them? If you're planning to stay somewhere for a long time then look at the base rent and the length of the lease. Let the landlords offering "specials" and short lease terms get taken advantage of by the tenants who know they're going to be moving in a year anyway.
> The only option to avoid this is moving every year (instability being clearly great for community /s) since corporate landlords will not negotiate rates.
An obvious option to avoid this is to avoid corporate landlords. Most rental properties are owned by a "corporation" in the sense that it's an LLC for liability reasons, but that doesn't mean the ones owned by an individual who lives in the same city and has fewer units than you can count on one hand behave the same way as the ones owned by some private equity schmucks, and there are lots of the former.
Also, who wants to rent the same unit for 30 years? Renting should be for people who haven't saved a down payment yet and people who are planning to move soon. When we're seeing people in middle age who want to stay in the same place but still can't afford to buy anything there, we need to be doing something about the unaffordability of buying rather than accepting the premise that we're going to continue screwing them into needing to rent.
The zoning restrictions cause the higher rents by themselves. No collusion is required and no solution is possible without addressing that.
Whereas if you do address that then how is the collusion supposed to work?
I think you might have the problem backwards. Realpage was about buyer collusion, and that wouldn't look any different from the prices naturally just rising in a market with more demand/less supply because even sellers who aren't colluding would still raise their prices if they saw that that was the going rate in the area.
When there are multiple competing factors all influencing price simultaneously it's very hard to accurately determine how much any particular factor contributed, or what the "actual price" would have been without them.
This is actually essentially the problem that justifies markets as an efficient way to arrive at fair prices - it's computationally too expensive to calculate the precise supply/demand ratios at any given moment, and demand can change much faster than supply can adjust (and nobody could ever really know how elastic demand is for things like local housing markets anyway).
So sellers want to respond to changes in demand by raising prices, because the business model of housing rentals is matching short term demand/pricing/risk to long term costs/costs/risk. But every buyer has their own demand preferences and every supplier has a different product with different fixed costs, and everybody knows their own demand preference and ability to provide supply, so the aggregate price a market settles at "collapses" all that information without explicit coordination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
If there truly is an increase in demand, as a buyer you probably do want rents to increase, because otherwise you get shortages like in Berlin where there is nothing to rent. So that's why coordinating to withold inventory with other sellers is bad, it creates a shortage anyway and only a small number of participants need to do it to move the entire market
The best solution is to contact the building but this is time intensive and you get a lot of spammy followup which is why we created https://fless.io to automate this process and help you find what is actually available and not just what zillow or the management company's website lists. It's still the best way to know what is truly available.
Look at the difference in prices between recent home sales and listed home prices, it's exactly the sort of information differential I'm talking about.
The US protects its homeowners above all, which is why there are these public databases of true sale prices of real estate. Renters should have the same protections and information too.
It's not very common for residential rental agreements to differ substantially from the listed price in the US. It is quite common for long time tenants to pay a different (usually much lower) rate than new listings (often as a result of government regulation or just people being nice to each other).
What realpage did that was illegal was suggest coordinated pricing/inventory management to their customers through their software.
What exactly are you expecting to uncover by knowing what people are paying for rent? I actually have nothing against that in principle. I just don't understand how that establishes any kind of evidence that somebody is doing something wrong.
Not clear to me that is the right approach, or if owning rentals should be more of a fixed income approach (or even speculative - profits only come from the sale of the property).
This actually works unless you inhibit the construction of new units. Naturally that's what we've been doing, which is why it isn't working. But the solution is to stop inhibiting the construction of new units.
Because the alternatives don't actually work. Unless you can build enough units to meet demand, there aren't enough units. Which means you either have high prices which suppress demand because people who can't afford them are forced out, or shortages because you're imposing some inadvisable price controls and then instead of being unable to get a unit because you can't afford the rent, you can't get a unit because they're all occupied and no one is adding more.
Alternatively we could keep the names private. A cryptographic solution would easily serve the need of authorities verifying the right person is in a place without identification, but good luck figuring out how to ensure the tenant has their keys somehow since in the US there are zero pieces of identification you can ensure every citizen has.
(Unless the other party to the contract deliberately asks you in the contract to keep it quiet. But that's something you need to actively agree to.)