> Specifically, every morning, RealPage provides participating Lessors with recommended price levels. ... If Lessors wish to diverge from the “approved pricing” they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval. ... But RealPage emphasizes the need for discipline among participating Lessors and urges them that for its coordinated algorithmic pricing to be the most successful in increasing rents, participating Lessors must adopt RealPage’s pricing at least 80% of the time.
> In one neighborhood in Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of apartments were overseen by just 10 property managers, every single one of which used pricing software sold by RealPage.
I would politely recommend reading the article, if you would like to comment on it.
> As former FTC chairwoman Maureen K. Ohlhausen put it, as quoted in ProPublica:
"Is it OK for a guy named Bob to collect confidential price strategy information from all the participants in a market and then tell everybody how they should price?' [Ohlhausen] said. 'If it isn’t OK for a guy named Bob to do it, then it probably isn’t OK for an algorithm to do it either."
A quick sanity check of that statement using Google pulls this from the FTC's website:
> Price fixing is an agreement (written, verbal, or inferred from conduct) among competitors to raise, lower, maintain, or stabilize prices or price levels.
Collusion doesn't stop being collusion just because one introduces a middleman.
As best I understand, for some charges you only have to think out loud about something hard enough to get charged for a lesser charge of Conspiracy.
If you do a thing and I planned it, we could get charged with a whole host of things. If I send you to buy a gun to commit the crime and oops that was an undercover cop, then a few warrants later we could be in a lot of trouble just for intent and opportunity.
> Specifically, every morning, RealPage provides participating Lessors with recommended price levels. ... If Lessors wish to diverge from the “approved pricing” they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval. ... But RealPage emphasizes the need for discipline among participating Lessors and urges them that for its coordinated algorithmic pricing to be the most successful in increasing rents, participating Lessors must adopt RealPage’s pricing at least 80% of the time.