>> The complaints showed that it’s more than just information sharing; RealPage has “pricing advisors” that monitor landlords and encourage them to accept suggested pricing, it works to get employees at landlord companies fired who try to move rents lower, and it even threatens to drop clients who don’t accept its high price recommendations.
My understanding of what's alleged: Landlords have incentive to join because they can collude with other landlords to get higher prices. If they don't participate in the price fixing, they lose access to the platform.
I have a really hard time believing these allegations because that would mean that they're actively trying to push away paying customers, which neither helps Realpage nor the alledged cartel. Everything I've read about this has been suspiciously vague. What it sounds like they're doing is punishing property managers from deviating from the pricing algorithm rather than the property companies themselves.
This is making the assumption that there's pushback against their "advice". People are stupid, greedy, and corrupt. Realpage only needed to make promises, promises that it could only keep if most of their customers followed suit, to get most (the vast, vast majority) of their customers to follow suit.
Their customers aren't mom and pop landlords with a second property; THey're not even full-time landlords with a dozen units that pay the bills. They're giant property investment companies, They "only" own a quarter of the units between them, but that's enough to shift the needle. They're very heirarchical, and if the upper management says "Use this pricing model", they'll just fire you if you don't. There are no exceptions, there's no leeway; They have internal apps for building the contracts and their "property managers" literally can't go outside of them.
How did RealPage do this? I'm OOTL.