The Algorithms that Raise Your Rent

Corporate landlords - landowning companies that answer to their shareholders, not their tenants - own the majority of apartment buildings in the United States. In a recent ProPublica piece, journalist Heather Vogell exposed the company RealPage as potentially fostering collusion between corporate landlords to keep rents high and units off the market. In this video we will explore the role of property technology (proptech) and how corporate landlords are using it to keep rents climbing, regardless of new supply coming onto the market.
Sources
The major sources for this video are from Vogell and Desiree Fields. Fields has researched and written about proptech extensively.
Heather Vogell: Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why.(www.propublica.org/article/yi...)
Heather Vogell: When Private Equity Becomes Your Landlord. (www.propublica.org/article/wh...)
Desiree Fields: Automated Landlord: Digital technologies and post-crisis financial accumulation (journals.sagepub.com/doi/full...)
Desiree Fields and Manon Vergerio: Corporate landlords and market power: What does the single-family rental boom mean for our housing future? (escholarship.org/uc/item/07d6...)
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Supporting sources include:
Brown: New Yorkers Never Came 'Flooding Back.' Why Did Rents Go Up So Much? Getting to the bottom of a COVID-era real estate mystery. (www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-re...)
DePhillis: Inflation Has Hit Tenants Hard. What About Their Landlords?www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/bu....
Frankel: The fight is on for control of RealPage antitrust litigation.(www.reuters.com/legal/litigat...)
Gustavussen: Corporate Landlords Are Taking Over - But Tenants Can Use their Monopolies Against Them. (jacobin.com/2022/06/corporate...)
Shultz: San Francisco voters back Prop. M, a vacancy tax on landlords. (www.sfgate.com/politics/artic...)
Turbo Tax: REITs (turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/...)

[@TheScourge007]

Great video! And to expand a bit on tenant organizing touched on in the last part, I have some personal experience there both with some success and some failures in a very landlord friendly state (Georgia). 1) The analogy with labor organizing is really important and many of the landlord tactics against tenant organizing are similar to the tactics of bosses. Fear mongering, splitting tenant ranks with sweat heart deals to certain tenants, use of private security or cops to intimidate, and just outright lies. Tenants have to be ready for all of these when they organize. 2) Media can be an important part of the strategy but don't trust even friendly reporters to fully be on your side! Reporters are often sympathetic but tend to be overly focused on the legal rules of what a landlord is allowed to do or not and they can tend to be a bit too credulous of landlord's lawyers' interpretation of the law. Don't rely on the press too heavily even as you should try your best to not alienate reporters (at least any not blatantly working with the landlords). 3) Reaching out to local politicians or non-profits is risky at best. On the one hand it can lead to increased media coverage and some pressure on the landlord to make concessions, but that can also mobilize the non-profit industrial complex to "help" in the least helpful ways possible. I once was organizing a tenants union against a mass eviction and the tenants decided they wanted to ask for support from their local county commissioner. After a week of him ignoring every petition and attempt to meet, we went to a campaign event he was holding (it was an election year) and disrupted it presenting our demands. Got a lot of positive press for that and an agreement for help. But the help was sending a bunch of NGOs to the complex and having them offer individual support in moving. We did manage to stop the mass eviction but the NGO bomb pretty much blew up the long term organizing effort by inducing a large percentage of the tenants move to different locations while the remainder eventually trickled out as their leases came up for renewal. 4) The people who need tenant unions the most are often people who have the most trouble organizing one. I once tried to organize some of my neighbors to do an action against a landlord who wouldn't fix a flooding problem that hit our units every time it rained. The problem was it turned out our neighbors were undocumented immigrants who were worried about pissing off the landlord and turning them over to ICE. Tenant union organizing is a protected activity in theory as with labor organizing, but some of the most vulnerable have the most hurdles to overcome in doing it. 5) Getting things started is easiest during a crisis point (like a mass eviction or super bad maintenance problem) but keeping organized in quieter periods is key to long term effectiveness. You've got to keep meeting with your neighbors and rely first and foremost on each other. Outsiders to a complex can help and solidarity between tenants unions and groups that support that activity is important, but at the end of the day any outsiders will go home to their place while you and your neighbors still live with the same landlord. Though one helpful idea to keep a union going in the lulls is to use it to organize social events. One case I had was a tenants union organizing a halloween party that was really popular with both folks dedicated to the union and folks who normally didn't show up to meetings. You need both to keep the tenants union going. 6) Finally, if there's no immediate crisis galvanizing organizing in your complex, just get to know your neighbors first. Landlords eventually will do something evil enough to piss off large groups of tenants, its just the incentives of landlordism. But organizing becomes a lot easier if your neighbors already know and like you (or at least trust your intentions). Be social since our social ties are the key to using our numbers. The landlord's got money and institution power, we've got numbers and are necessary for their wealth. But we can only exert the power of those numbers with trust.

[@radicalplanning]

amazing insights here- thank you so much for sharing!

[@ThickieComrade]

The idea of my landlords discussing my downfall via Scruff feels hilariously accurate and evil. The world has no space for landlords, let alone corporate ones.

[@vootamu1]

This also applies to the "evil" property managers that work for "corporate landlords."

[@pest174]

The FBI raided Cortland Management and Real Page for price fixing. I love it.

[@radicalplanning]

do you think they saw my video LOL

[@pest174]

@@radicalplanning I hope so 🤣

[@ryansmith1810]

Love the "capital strike" analogy. Ive heard "why would landlords keep units off the market, dont they want to earn income on that unit?". This is easily answered by, "Why do labor unions keep their labor off the market when they go on strike? Dont they want more hours and more money?"

[@francorossi1763]

that's the thing, if there were people willing to work at that wage, those on strike would loose their jobs. If you see there's an opportunity in real state buisness, you should join! You are saying real state is being extremely profitable, why isn't everybody joining, especially you, the one who notices this

[@ABCTest-bj3bd]

This video is very informative. I hope everyone can share it!

[@tonyagrubbs3033]

Great video of a sad reality. I have a recording from when I filled out an application for a diff apt in the same property. and overnight rpm living took over and raised the rent $400 from the amount it was when I filled out the app. This was over a year ago but since this Realpage info has come out I listened to it more recently and it’s just. Gross.

[@alexspike7331]

Fantastic video. I want to add that much of your program: short term goals including rent control, caps on fees, vacancy taxes and the long term goals: publicly owned democratically run social housing program is exactly what Kshama Sawant in Seattle is doing. Just a year or so ago, she won a tax on amazon to fund affordable housing, won first in the nation renter's protections such as no evictions of homes with children in them during the school year, and a cap on late fees (she wanted ten dollars flat cap buy her fellow councilmembers all bog standard democrats or ''''progressives''' changed it to a cap of 50 dollars, which few fees were already greater than). Her objective now is rent control without qualification or conditions. She and the social movements in Seattle fighting for these are a role model for how we can win everywhere by using elected positions to boost social movements, labor movements and more.

[@help4Frenchie]

if a property- a residential triplex split into 5 apts- is bought by an LLC (that for all intents & purposes, LOOKS like a "shell company" ie just a name on paper), does that count as a corporate landlord? it truly feels as if rent will just keep increasing forever.. how far can they go, when will it be truly too much?? meanwhile so many ppl are still trying to live off $1K income per month but statistics all say we need a minimum of $6K?? just *how*.. my elderly friend (who is also mentally handicapped) had his home of 22yrs bought by such an LLC (the longtime owner was an older elderly lady who passed from cancer after entrusting the property to some young "family friend" who ended up being a scammy flipper that put it back on the market at nearly twice cost, then sold to the LLC) & so rent has already gone up ~40% in the past two years & since covid my elderly friend has been unable to work & we've both burned thru savings trying to keep him there because that raised rent is ~100% his Social Security retirement leaving no income for anything else in his life.. 😭

[@gusbreslauer713]

BANGER

[@cristinawilliams8026]

Real Page is going to be sued in every city.

[@paikiwika]

How about the government condemn these properties and rent them out as non-market housing? Just thinking out loud.

[@suejonmeyers8362]

Excellent piece, I am subscribing...thank you for your great insight

[@brianwheeldon4643]

Great work, thanks

[@vootamu1]

"Harassment campaigns" have been going on where I live. Wickedness abounds!

[@galen__]

👍

[@ianjames8140]

Not sure if you’ll see this but why would rent control work? How would that not drive up prices for people who aren’t able to get into rent controlled units?

[@cw4959]

Capitol strike is such a powerful idea. Great video

[@onetwothreeabc]

So owning your dwelling place is a solution?

[@str8gamer964]

If you apartments is under Greystar they’re using this software

[@TheRealisticNihilist]

Doesn't it seem lucrative to just compete with corporate landlord as a typical landlord then?

[@Fresh-Rocket]

We should do a collaboration

[@marksoberay2318]

Are you taking action? How about because the landlord you want to see. Get some properties and rent them really cheap and do lots of free services for tenants. Be a hero!