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ThePermafrost t1_itubbu0 wrote

As a property manager, I know that the major property management softwares like Yardi have an option to have AI set rents. It says it calculates the best rent according to market trends and is so adaptive that rents can change daily. I had not considered how easily Yardi could use this to just fix prices, being the dominant market shareholder for PM software.

The PM’s might not have know it was price fixing, they were just using the software as intended.

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buried_lede OP t1_itv0jr2 wrote

I agree. I think they are suing the software company, not the landlords. It certainly isn’t an old fashioned kind of price fixing, more new territory thanks to gobs of data and AI. But there were also meetings with some of the largest owners/landlords who probably understood their data was in the mix and on some level shared. Of course they all research each other’s prices anyway. Will be interested to see where this goes. I think renters are being exploited definitely, treated extremely poorly

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