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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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The old adage used to be that an empty rental was costing you money. Landlords would work for around 75+% occupancy, and to achieve that the price would also stay lower, to keep it occupied.
Then the price fixing of airlines happened, and the guy responsible (whose name I can't recall at the moment - maybe someone else does?) went into real estate with the same software approach. The theory? If you can charge enough off of a few to pay for all the others, then occupancy doesn't matter.
Let's use the numbers from the OP - $700 and $3600, with a 20 year gap. The post is from several years back, but let's use 2004 and 2024 for inflation calcs. $700 in 2004 is just a hair under $1200 today, so with a cost of $3600 - triple - that would mean one tenant has the same value to them as three. So if you have 6 units and have 3 tenants, you're now making a LOT more money overall, as those two tenants provided the same as six under the older model.
TL;DR: Shitty people and shitty companies trying to get the most money they can, with zero regard for the impact of these decisions.
San Francisco the first city in the nation ban the practice, using rent-setting software?
That still needs to go through an approval process, so not until September.
Even still, I wouldn't consider that regulation to be the end-all be-all of dealing with it. The ban, iirc, is specifically for "algorithmic price setting". So let's say that goes through, and I'm a landlord. Here's the regulation:
Well I can still hire a consultant, can't I? A person, maybe one who works for a larger consulting firm. So I hire them to determine the "appropriate" price. So this consultant needs to come up with the prices for me, how are they going to come up with it?
Well they can still use software to run calculations, right? As long as I, the landlord, am not purchasing, licensing, or otherwise provided a device that uses an algorithm (a very generic term here, which is a separate issue), that consultant can use a variety of tools to come up with values can't they? So the consultant uses multiples of the same systems for evaluation, and provides the landlord with the same price/price range I would have gotten in the first place.
This is how I expect it to be worked around at least.