Landlords Are Using AI to Raise Rents—and Cities Are Starting to Push Back
https://gizmodo.com/landlords-are-using-ai-to-raise-rents-and-cities-are-starting-to-push-back-2000535519
Landlords Are Using AI to Raise Rents—and Cities Are Starting to Push Back
https://gizmodo.com/landlords-are-using-ai-to-raise-rents-and-cities-are-starting-to-push-back-2000535519
12 Comments
From the article: If you’ve hunted for apartments recently and felt like all the rents were equally high, you’re not crazy: Many landlords now use a single company’s software — which uses an algorithm based on proprietary lease information — to help set rent prices.
Federal prosecutors say the practice amounts to “an unlawful information-sharing scheme,” and some lawmakers throughout California are moving to curb it. San Diego’s city council president is the latest to do so, proposing a ban that would prevent local apartment owners from using the pricing service, which he maintains is driving up housing costs.
San Diego’s proposed ordinance, which is currently being drafted, comes after San Francisco enacted a first-in-the-nation ban on “the sale or use of algorithmic devices to set rents or manage occupancy levels” for residences in July. San Jose is considering a similar approach.
When humans do it it’s illegal and called price fixing, when an algorithm does it, it’s called innovation and the media class calls it a rent increase to run cover.
This also allows landlords to absolve themselves of any responsibility for high rents and evicting tenants when they aren’t setting the high rents themselves but are only charging the market rate they have been told to set by the computer.
Landphobia, again. When will the oppression on landlords end?
Airlines have been doing this for a while, too.
Maybe there needs to be more DLC for that game series.
Anyone know some of these landlords? asking for a friend.
I mean the vast majority of rentals in my town are ran by the same property management group and are also buying up all the retired small land lord properties.
As according to the property management group it’s a red hot market right now and they are just matching the comparable rentals in the area. Without mentioning they control that price too.
In a Facebook group and a town next to me has zero industry and one tiny overpriced store in a town of 8k and are charging almost Chicago rent prices. One person was complaining she got a 30 day notice of a 30% increase.
It’s not so much that a landlord cannot come up with their own number for how much they want in rent, but rather, it helps them distance themselves psychologically from the greed
Sorry I’m absolutely gonna be a little bit of a bigot in this comment, because I’ve known about this for over 31 days, and the company selling the software has been active over 6 years, and I’m still waiting on anyone to do a thing about it. Mainly because conceptually it seems turvo illegal, but in practice no one has given a single fuck for 1/2 a decade. Comment: I’m still waiting…
The FBI was investigating and they raided the offices of RealPage. With Trump taking over, I have no doubt the investigation will be stopped
they’ve been using these same algorithms since long before we started calling everything AI, it’s nothing new, just straight up price fixing.
Not every automated algorithm is “AI”.
The formulas used by RentMaximizer and similar companies are extremely simple.
Their widespread use may indeed be a bad thing, but it’s silly to attach the “AI” buzzword to a process that could probably be duplicated in Excel.