As a renter myself, I have tremendous sympathy for the tenants affected by this. But there is a way to frame this whole saga that makes it much more innocuous:
By maximizing individual profit, the software rapidly finds the real fair market value of rentals. It turns out that the fair market value for rentals is much higher than people thought! This should make sense: housing supply is low, housing demand is high, and housing demand is extremely inelastic. It is a situation where egregious profits should be expected! Landlords simply hadn't realized that they could charge more.
There is one seemingly illogical result, which is that some units go vacant despite the huge demand. But unsold goods are a normal part price discovery, and we are not talking about a huge change: occupancy rates only drop a few percent.
It's a brutal result for tenants, but the alternative is incorrect pricing, which has its own negative implications for the whole market.
With price fixing, would-be competitors cooperate and function as a monopoly. That’s not a functioning market. These services act as a centralization point to accomplish the price fixing without colluding directly with each other. It’s actually much more efficient than traditional price fixing!
Out of curiosity, where do you draw the line? Say there was some open-source pricing tool that runs completely locally, operating only on public data and not sharing information with others. Would you consider it price fixing if it became standard practice to use it?
> Would you consider it price fixing if it became standard practice to use it?
If competing businesses agreed to use the tool and not deviate (or not deviate more than a set amount) from its suggested price, then yes, that's totally price fixing.
I believe that it's price fixing even if they merely agree to use it to inform their starting offering price.
In some other comment thread, folks mentioned that if a landlord outsources rent price investigation to a third party, that third party has to be __very__ careful about working with other landlords, so as to not even accidentally engage in price fixing by recommending prices to multiple competing landlords.
By maximizing individual profit, the software rapidly finds the real fair market value of rentals. It turns out that the fair market value for rentals is much higher than people thought! This should make sense: housing supply is low, housing demand is high, and housing demand is extremely inelastic. It is a situation where egregious profits should be expected! Landlords simply hadn't realized that they could charge more.
There is one seemingly illogical result, which is that some units go vacant despite the huge demand. But unsold goods are a normal part price discovery, and we are not talking about a huge change: occupancy rates only drop a few percent.
It's a brutal result for tenants, but the alternative is incorrect pricing, which has its own negative implications for the whole market.