We're not talking about grandpa and grandma renting out their extra home: Meet the Billionaire Investors Behind the US Housing Affordability Crisis
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
292 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
59989 readers
2362 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
AI is a plaque upon housing in America.
facepalm.jpg
It's the first thing after the title. At least it wasn't an AI article I suppose.
They meant it makes your breath bad and hardens your arteries
I'll take humanity where I can get it.
1/4 of California state lawmakers are landlords. If a user of this software doesn't want to charge as much as the algorithm says, it gets escalated and RealPage tries to sell them on the price.
Yeah, it's pretty similar where I'm at too. Unfortunately, the nature of being a legislator means you can only become one if you don't need to work a regular job. And landlording is certainly one of those jobs that gives you free time to campaign and work as a legislator.
Landlords are trying to point blame at fucking AI ?
The AI is just allowing them to work together in a giant price fixing scheme.
And this scheme has been quietly building in many industries for the past decade or so. Be it by AI or just an intermediary.
They are all following the “guidance” of some entity in their industry that is paid to be an expert. And everyone in the industry signs up. That expert then “advises” on pricing and other choices. And slowly over time they are essentially colluding, but with more steps, and then they also benefit from the ability to talk in circles when called on it.
The practice needs to be outlawed across the board.
No. Maybe that's just clickbait, or maybe the writers here prefer AI to be the target of the outrage. The complaint has very little to do with AI.
It's sparkling price fixing, totally different than still water price fixing.
capitalism is not very competive and therefore, price-fixing between small group of large players, is almost inevitable outcome.
Yea but this is a situation in which price fixing would be nearly impossible without the intermediary, due to the large number of participants. And price fixing is still illegal.
You don’t need price fixing for any industry to go this direction. Take the gas station idea. You’ve got a corner with 4 gas stations. Each one can see the traffic the other ones get and can easily see how much they charge. All it takes is them saying “well, people are still buying gas at that station for $X more than mine, so I’ll charge that as well. And soon they’re all skyrocketing to whatever the consumers can afford.
Calling a group put on Price Fixing requires proving they colluded together to do so, but that’s not required in this scenario. Every landlord can see how much other rents are and if they can make more money and keep their renters or get new ones, they will push that limit. And honestly if they can raise it enough to cover some vacancies they’ll do that, charging 30% more but having 10% empty is still a net 20% in their pockets.
I would argue that the app is essentially the collusion.
#notanexpert . but to argue my case:
in some housing markets:
"Top 5 companies control 70% of the market: The top 5 real estate companies in the <city's> market, including Ebby Halliday, Keller Williams, RE/MAX, Coldwell Banker, and Century 21, control approximately 70% of the market share"
Are you sure they are the companies owning the homes? They look like realtors to me.
I have heard of rental funds buying up real estate but I think this is still a relatively small portion of the market with a relatively large number of players such as these
thanks for the tip. the number would seem to sit at 40% dominance by urban landlords.
i would think that the housing market, affects the rental market. but not always. apart from homebuyers that get priced out and have to re-enter the rental market.
I'm not sure what that means, but if the link I gave was correct and the biggest one has ~85,000 homes, that's only 0.1% of the total US single family housing market of 82 million single family homes. That would indicate that there would be thousands of landlords in most areas, meaning that collusion between them would require a sophisticated networked system between them.
They have been using algos to fix rent since at least mid 2010s.
Same thing with other industries. When they have all the data they able to extract the exact amount.
Limp dick goverment is enabling this.
In essence we are getting gang banged by landlords while the government is watching in the corner while jerking off.
These parasites have no fear... Maybe now they got lil. Dead ceo is a pretty strong message
AI is a plague ~~upon housing in America.~~
This isn't about "AI", it's about greedy landlords.
Not in California, we specifically voted to lick that corporate boot.