>but it isn't hard to see what people are charging these days and adjust your price accordingly.

yes but normally you are trying to acquire tenants. how do you get more renters? provide more value either through amenities, price or both. then competing entities do the same and lower prices or give you more bang for your buck. the last thing you want to do is raise prices when no one else is because you will inevitably lose tenants.

but what if there were a centralized entity that scraped all the data, inflated prices X%, then went around pressuring people to increase their rents to match "market" data and annoyed the hell out of anyone who didnt or tried to compete and lower their rent while telling them they are doing the same to their competitors so dont worry about competition.

if that happened you could raise rents dramatically in a short time frame with zero fear because no one else is going to undercut you.

thats called a cartel. theres a very famous one that you probably have heard of, they collude to control the supply and price of oil instead of letting competition exist, OPEC.

the bigger issues you alluded to with supply being gobbled up and consolidated under large companies? thats what enabled RealPage to pull this off. i would be willing to bet RealPage is backed by one of these larger companies that has gobbled up supply and this was their way of driving up the price rapidly.