this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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  • A group of lawsuits accuse large landlords of price-fixing the market rate of rent in the United States
  • A complaint filed by Washington D.C.’s Attorney General alleges 14 landlords in the district are sharing competitively sensitive data through RealPage, a real estate software provider
  • RealPage recommends prices for roughly 4.5 million housing units in the United States
  • RealPage told CNBC that its landlord customers are under no obligation to take their price suggestions

A group of renters in the U.S. say their landlords are using software to deliver inflated rent hikes.

“We’ve been told as tenants by employees of Equity that the software takes empathy out of the equation. So they can charge whatever the software tells them to charge,” said Kevin Weller, a tenant at Portside Towers since 2021.

Tenants say the management started to increase prices substantially after giving renters concessions during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (24 children)

Then where does the money go?

If someone rents you a house do they get to charge only the mortgage? What about repairs and other unforeseen expenses to keep it up? And if you pay for repairs that never happen, what then?

If people can only break even on renting, many just. They'll sit in empty houses until market prices increases, exacerbating all of this.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (23 children)

What I'm saying is renting shouldn't exist to begin with. People should not own more than one living place and that place should be the place that they live in.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (5 children)

OK. What does someone do when they move somewhere new and can't afford to purchase a house? Or don't want to purchase a place because they expect to live somewhere 6-12mo for a contract?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The solutions I've seen require a fundamental rethinking of the way housing works in the USA (and most places), where renting just turns into another way to build some amount of equity, and the property managers are under more democratic control. More of the process subsidized by the local government, in the same way that water treatment is.

Arguably it's renting by another name, but the central point is to strip the profit motive out of it (some salaries are needed, but in a system with more regulatory oversight) and to allow the renter to get some financial benefit so they aren't simply pissing money away.

Apologies in advance for that vague response: I'm not an economist or real estate expert, so I can't back up that general idea with any kind of details or evidence it's feasible.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Yeah, I agree totally. That's a great idea. Lease-to-own or something similar. As a renter I'd love to build some form of equity. Because in the US the only real way to build equity or generational wealth is through owning property. Which makes real estate a VERY hot commodity to speculate in. Which is a huge problem for people who just want somewhere to live and built modest equity like everyone else has.

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