Comment by epistasis
13 hours ago
We need a public rental registry of rental prices that anybody can browse, analyze, etc. The information disparity is a problem.
However, that's not a systematic method for lower prices. It just prevents individual cases of price gouging.
Is this not almost exactly what you get on apartments.com or zillow.com by just looking at the listed prices in an area?
I think you might have the problem backwards. Realpage was about buyer collusion, and that wouldn't look any different from the prices naturally just rising in a market with more demand/less supply because even sellers who aren't colluding would still raise their prices if they saw that that was the going rate in the area.
When there are multiple competing factors all influencing price simultaneously it's very hard to accurately determine how much any particular factor contributed, or what the "actual price" would have been without them.
This is actually essentially the problem that justifies markets as an efficient way to arrive at fair prices - it's computationally too expensive to calculate the precise supply/demand ratios at any given moment, and demand can change much faster than supply can adjust (and nobody could ever really know how elastic demand is for things like local housing markets anyway).
So sellers want to respond to changes in demand by raising prices, because the business model of housing rentals is matching short term demand/pricing/risk to long term costs/costs/risk. But every buyer has their own demand preferences and every supplier has a different product with different fixed costs, and everybody knows their own demand preference and ability to provide supply, so the aggregate price a market settles at "collapses" all that information without explicit coordination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
If there truly is an increase in demand, as a buyer you probably do want rents to increase, because otherwise you get shortages like in Berlin where there is nothing to rent. So that's why coordinating to withold inventory with other sellers is bad, it creates a shortage anyway and only a small number of participants need to do it to move the entire market
How it works in Victoria, Australia is for renewing an existing lease is you must provide examples of comparable rentals in the area at or above the price you are proposing. And the tenant can dispute with their own comparable if they believe the price is wrong. New listings can be listed at any price.
There is enough turnover with new listings to find the market rate while preventing existing tenants from being screwed over by unreasonable prices.
Australia also almost entirely works off rentals owned by individuals who own 1-3 properties rather than corporate owners so no one landlord has any sway over the market.
Most landlords arent big corporate in the USA either especially in areas where the housing crisis is the worst.
I think this narrative is just meant to distract people from questioning the necessity of the landlord class, they want people angry at a faceless corporate boogieman instead of local landlords (for obvious reasons)
Rental prices are set at the edge, so you only need to own a fraction of the market to drive rent increases. Corporate landlords absolutely do this.
Services like RealPage provide information that allows the small landlord to act like corporate overlords, praise be American corporatism.
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We have something similar in Spain, except instead of "comparable rentals in the area" there is a index (called IRAV (Índice de Referencia de los Alquileres)) maintained by the government each year, which limits how much rents can be increased. My landlord just reference that each year, it's easy for me to check if it's right, then that's it. For the areas where supply is limited ("áreas tensionadas"), as some areas like Barcelona is geographically limited to expansion, there is a total limit as well, independent of the IRAV.
Of course, if there are improvements in the rental, you can go beyond the index as the property been "improved", but it's really handy to know each year that it's limited and the exact amount. For 2026 it's locked to 2.14% for example, for everyone.
A growing body of economic research shows that this allows producers to keep prices high even with lots of competition.
By what mechanism do the producers keep prices high if the "lots of competition" is constantly undercutting them and adding new supply to replace anything the colluding subset tries to withhold from the market?
Cost cutting while shopping for expendable commodities does not result in a long term drop in quality of life in the same way that cost cutting while selecting your residence could.
Apartment landlords don't undercut each other. They raise rents in lockstep and then offer "specials" like a month off (amortized) that lower initial out-of-pocket costs without affecting the base rent, which gets raised on subsequent lease renewals to make up the difference. The only option to avoid this is moving every year (instability being clearly great for community /s) since corporate landlords will not negotiate rates.
If the evidence seems to disagree with your theory, maybe your theory has to change?
The prices should be delayed two months. The rate at which pricing information propagates dictates how much of the rental pricing mass (number of owners * average units owned) gets thrown around how quickly. I don't have a number, but something like 2 months. Treat this data as if it was a vile of Devil's venom [1]. If they setup back channel information sharing networks, or collusion networks of any kind. <bad thing happens, not just a fee>
Second, the historical database should be deleted. And if they can't survive that, so be it. Keeping the spoils of crime should be the crime. Justice still isn't finished.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_venom
Can you share several articles about this? I haven't found one but it's hard to search for.
Should rentals be seen as economic opportunities for hyper efficiencies? IE should the market be structured to extract the maximum profit from renters?
Not clear to me that is the right approach, or if owning rentals should be more of a fixed income approach (or even speculative - profits only come from the sale of the property).
The general premise of the rental market is that if rents are high, the profits from building new rental units will justify the construction costs and then new units will be added until the rents go down, i.e. until it stops being profitable to add more.
This actually works unless you inhibit the construction of new units. Naturally that's what we've been doing, which is why it isn't working. But the solution is to stop inhibiting the construction of new units.
Because the alternatives don't actually work. Unless you can build enough units to meet demand, there aren't enough units. Which means you either have high prices which suppress demand because people who can't afford them are forced out, or shortages because you're imposing some inadvisable price controls and then instead of being unable to get a unit because you can't afford the rent, you can't get a unit because they're all occupied and no one is adding more.
Some states have solved this to some extent with the builder's remedy to override local zoning decisions.
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We have that in my city. Works great. If your city doesn't have one you don't have to wait for an official one. You can crowdsource rent data.
Al la dc rent registry, which I always thought was ironic because doesn’t this create a database where landlords can consider prices based on others… but I guess it would be public in this case.
https://rentregistry.dc.gov/
Well the point of market based interventions and government regulations like this is primarily to reduce information asymmetry. You still ultimately need to increase supply or reduce demand to move price.
Depends on the rate of information update and how long the records are retained for. High frequency updates create a higher fidelity information channel.
I don’t see why rental agreements can’t be registered with the county like house sales are. It would also eliminate the need for squatter laws, as it would be trivial for police to pull up the county website and see who belongs in the home.
Berlin wants to do that to enforce rent control more effectively.
Americans are too privacy focused to accept this, but I could easily see a cottage industry of "registered agents" popping up around it who sign leases on behalf of individuals and shield them from public scrutiny.
Alternatively we could keep the names private. A cryptographic solution would easily serve the need of authorities verifying the right person is in a place without identification, but good luck figuring out how to ensure the tenant has their keys somehow since in the US there are zero pieces of identification you can ensure every citizen has.
Are we privacy focused? Look at products like Facebook Muse, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Whatsapp, or the perv glasses, or or or
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I think publishing your own rental contract is already legal?
(Unless the other party to the contract deliberately asks you in the contract to keep it quiet. But that's something you need to actively agree to.)
It’s more credible if it’s in a government database like property sales are, plus there would be a lot more pricing data.
Well, a Torrens registry systems still isn't universal yet in the US.
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