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HeavenlyPossum Jul 15, 2023

A journalist recently noticed something strange about the New York City housing market. During the peak of the COVID crisis in NYC, the city lost close to seven percent of its population as people either died or moved away.

The real estate vacancy rate was close to twenty-five percent.

Since then, according to an array of parties with considerable interest in rents, the population of NYC has rebounded. As a result, housing is once again scarce and rents have soared.

Except…there’s no actual indication that the city’s population has actually rebounded, and certainly not by enough to explain soaring rental prices. After all, the city’s population had already started to decline before 2020.

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https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-real-estate-covid-more-apartments-higher-rent.html

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HeavenlyPossum Jul 15, 2023

It’s hard to explain this discrepancy unless you assume that landlords are conspiring to keep housing stock empty and off the market—ie, “warehousing”—to keep supply artificially low and prices high.

As of 2021, there were over 40,000 rent-stabilized apartments warehoused in the city, so we might imagine that the total number of apartments being withheld is much higher.

But that’s absurd, some neoliberal might declare! How could landlords, who are very numerous, conspire with each other across the entire city to manipulate the market ?

ProPublica helpfully supplies the answer: a firm called RealPage, which provides software called YieldStar, which allows landlords across the country to coordinate price increases en masse:

https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent

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Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why.

Texas-based RealPage’s YieldStar software helps landlords set prices for apartments across the U.S. With rents soaring, critics are concerned that the company’s proprietary algorithm is hurting competition.

ProPublica

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LisPi Jul 15, 2023

@HeavenlyPossum > ProPublica helpfully supplies the answer: a firm called RealPage, which provides software called YieldStar, which allows landlords across the country to coordinate price increases en masse:

You know, this sounds like #collusion and #PriceFixing as a service.

I wonder who's liable? The users? The provider? Both?

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HeavenlyPossum Jul 15, 2023

@lispi314

I can’t speak to the legalities of it, but yeah, this is how capitalism generally works

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LisPi Jul 15, 2023

@HeavenlyPossum Yeah, given their capture of the legislative system I'm not particularly optimistic they'll get the comeuppance even the current laws say they should be getting.

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Bella Ciao appreciator

@lispi314 @HeavenlyPossum it’s not even so much their capture of the legislative system so much as the existence of the legislative system itself-the state begets capitalism and capitalism begets the state. To abolish one requires the abolition of the other.