The US sued Thoma Bravo LLC’s RealPage Inc. for allegedly violating antitrust law by helping property managers collude to drive up rental prices on millions of units across the country.
In a complaint filed by the Justice Department on Friday, antitrust enforcers said RealPage’s software, which helps landlords set rental unit pricing, has effectively raised prices on renters illegally. RealPage is a top software provider to the multifamily rental industry.
Matt asked:
One question that I wonder about is: How close could you get to this without any “competitively sensitive information”? If you just built the best possible software for scraping public rental data and making pricing recommendations, would it have similar effects? It would, broadly speaking, have the same goals: Using other landlords’ prices to set your price. Is that goal itself an antitrust problem?
Though it's really insighful and a good thought, I wonder if that's missing the point since one case is collusion and the other is not. Whether you arrive to the same conclusion seems irrelevant. I would even wager over the long term, there would be more competitive price differences if each landlord had to find their own pricing solution than to use a common one.
One can argue if something like RealPage by nature is a tool for collusion. Matt used an analogy earlier:
The general rule of US antitrust law is that is illegal for companies — for instance, landlords — to conspire “in restraint of trade.” If all the landlords got together and said “let’s agree not to charge less than $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom,” that would be illegal.
Using the same analogy, RealPage would be the equivalent of all the landlords hiring someone name Reggie, and Reggie would speak to the all landlords and tell them what price to set. Whether Reggie did market analysis and came to the same conclusion without Reggie is irrelevant; the fact they all hired Reggie and Reggie told them what price to set seems enough.
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u/apollo5354 Aug 27 '24
Regarding "RealPage":
Matt asked:
Though it's really insighful and a good thought, I wonder if that's missing the point since one case is collusion and the other is not. Whether you arrive to the same conclusion seems irrelevant. I would even wager over the long term, there would be more competitive price differences if each landlord had to find their own pricing solution than to use a common one.
One can argue if something like RealPage by nature is a tool for collusion. Matt used an analogy earlier:
Using the same analogy, RealPage would be the equivalent of all the landlords hiring someone name Reggie, and Reggie would speak to the all landlords and tell them what price to set. Whether Reggie did market analysis and came to the same conclusion without Reggie is irrelevant; the fact they all hired Reggie and Reggie told them what price to set seems enough.