What if the largest landlords in a community just hired someone to canvas the city on a monthly basis and collect rental price data that way.
In most markets, comparative pricing of other vendors is always a solid baseline for where to start pricing your product. Market intelligence is a critical part of any go to market strategy.
Edit: Just to be clear, I think market collusion is anti-competitive. But where is the dividing line between market research and collusion? Clearly if landlords met in the back of a smoky bar the last sunday of every month to set rents - we'd call that collusion. But is such formal data sharing and price setting actually required to achieve the same effect - practically, landlords could just observe each other's rents to achieve a similar effect. Where should the law decide it is collusion?
> But where is the dividing line between market research and collusion?
Scale and ubiquity make all the difference in the world even if it seems like the same public data.
An example that comes to mind, different topic but somewhat analogous: cameras recording activity in public spaces. Some people argue there is nothing different happening today from decades ago because if you are doing activities in a public space anyone could record you just fine whether 50 years ago or today.
But they are wrong, it is vastly different. Fifty years ago someone could record you in that public space, but the odds were infinitesimally small that someone actually did. And if they did, the odds of anyone else finding that video were smaller yet. Today with ubiquitous cameras everywhere recording everything all the time it's a near certainty that you are being recorded in public spaces. And with all that video going into "the cloud" and usually available to every government agency, it's all analyzed and indexed and thus searchable at a scale never before imaginable.
Long-winded example to show that scale makes all the difference even if the underlying action is the same. Sure, some landlords have colluded with some others for centuries, but the ability for all of them to collude on every property real-time is a fundamental shift.
You can hire people to scrape the Internet for artwork and then produce images in arbitrary styles (same for text), but you would need to constantly pay them wages (benefitting their lives, reducing unemployment, injecting money into the economy) and you can only do so much. If they become good enough they will just quit and live off freelance commissions.
Similarly, if you hire low-paid people to canvas the city for rent prices, and yet more people to aggregate them without any ML, chances are one of them is renting and will raise the question with the authorities, and also why not just drop off to start own real estate agency with all that data.
In most markets, comparative pricing of other vendors is always a solid baseline for where to start pricing your product. Market intelligence is a critical part of any go to market strategy.
Edit: Just to be clear, I think market collusion is anti-competitive. But where is the dividing line between market research and collusion? Clearly if landlords met in the back of a smoky bar the last sunday of every month to set rents - we'd call that collusion. But is such formal data sharing and price setting actually required to achieve the same effect - practically, landlords could just observe each other's rents to achieve a similar effect. Where should the law decide it is collusion?