U.S. landlords who use RealPage products to set prices on rental apartments are facing accusations of collusion.
  • A group of lawsuits accuse large landlords of price-fixing the market rate of rent in the United States
  • A complaint filed by Washington D.C.’s Attorney General alleges 14 landlords in the district are sharing competitively sensitive data through RealPage, a real estate software provider
  • RealPage recommends prices for roughly 4.5 million housing units in the United States
  • RealPage told CNBC that its landlord customers are under no obligation to take their price suggestions

A group of renters in the U.S. say their landlords are using software to deliver inflated rent hikes.

“We’ve been told as tenants by employees of Equity that the software takes empathy out of the equation. So they can charge whatever the software tells them to charge,” said Kevin Weller, a tenant at Portside Towers since 2021.

Tenants say the management started to increase prices substantially after giving renters concessions during the Covid-19 pandemic.

  • KptnAutismus@lemmy.world
    11·
    10 months ago

    having to be responsible for the actual property seems to be a good idea.

    idk how it’s handled in germany, but i’m not aware of stuff this bad. i have someone in my family who has renters, and they either go fix stuff themselves or pay a professional if the heating’s acting up again.

    and being a renter of someonecs privately owned apartment in a corporate owned house, i feel like being taken care of adequately.

    i hope it gets better for you guys.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
      82·
      10 months ago

      Thanks for your response. I think that in the US one of our big issues is inconsistency. What I’ve described here is unprecedented for me until now but I’m sure many others have had much worse. The basic idea I think is that the bigger a company gets, the more they feel emboldened to get away with shit to save a buck here and there.

      It’s insanely dehumanizing for someone to lie to your face and tell you their hands are tied and your broken heat will just have to stand for an unknown amount of time. My landlord before this was an amazing man who I will never forget. Many times he showed good will beyond what was required and you can bet your ass he would’ve had the heat fixed within a week at most even if he had to spend $10,000 to do it. In fact the heat did break once and he had someone there the next morning. Meanwhile the company with hundreds of millions in revenue refuses to spend a buck to expedite the process because they have the cheapest deal possible with some contractor who is slammed

      The management in this building treats us like idiots who don’t matter. Despite repeated fuckups, everything is always “we’re doing the best we can”. If they were doing the best they could, none of these issues would’ve last longer than like a week and a half. The tenants here were damn near mutiny level it was so bad. People were posting notes with numbers to call and an exact count of how many days the elevators were out. It felt good to at least see people doing something to hold the assholes accountable.