Meanwhile, those of us who are involved and actually go to hearings in our cities see the same thing over and over again. Our 'neighbors' fighting to stop housing: https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...
Places that use RealPage saw big increases in rent even if their supply wasn’t as constrained as SF.
RealPage may maximize rents but the maximums will be lower if there is more supply.
That means that the shortage is between 3% and 5% of the total homes available in the US (around 140M). And given there are under 700k homeless in the US (I wish it were lower, but it is lower than I was expecting before looking it up), most people are finding homes to live in.
By most measures, and given how new homes are being built every single day (and are very, very likely being sold as soon as they're up), it's not even remotely close to "woefully inadequate".
And for a moment, let's just say we agree and the supply is woefully inadequate. Two things can be true at the same time. A shortage of housing supply dovetails nicely with landlords colluding to identify the highest possible price point for their housing.
> And for a moment, let's just say we agree and the supply is woefully inadequate. Two things can be true at the same time. A shortage of housing supply dovetails nicely with landlords colluding to identify the highest possible price point for their housing.
And yes, they do dovetail. The best way to cut landlord profits is to give tenants a lot of options. RealPage is not a good actor - there's no real upside to it from what I can tell. I'd be fine if they just went away. However, broadly speaking, given more supply, rents fall. There is just tons of empirical evidence for that at this point.
The Bay Area as a whole is an even more striking difference — 1959's estimate for 2020 was 14.4 million (same link above), and the actual 2020 population of the nine counties was almost exactly half that at 7.7 million https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/population
The same story applies to most booming cities, both in the first world and third world. They'll always blame "greedy landlords," expats, private equity, tourists, and whatever the latest boogeyman is.
It seems that constrained supply and consolidation in real estate companies are two causes. Both cause upward pressure individually, but together have an even more powerful effect.
This only bans software that uses "Non-public competitor data" to set rents. You could still sell a product that just scrapes apartment websites to find the average rent in a neighborhood, for example, you just can't blatantly collude with other landlords anymore.
California politicians make a big show of sounding progressive, when the outcomes they generate worsen inequality. Ibram X Kendi writes about this - policy that results in racist outcomes is racist, regardless of the tone its creators take.
So basically realizing that it is better that they exist and have this data than to try to spite their competitors. Since I imagine without this data their value goes down.
So while they may be helping their competitors get data, their competitors are also helping them and then each company survive on their algorithm and contracts.
