“Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?
“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”
The celebratory remarks were more than swagger. For years, RealPage has sold software that uses data analytics to suggest daily prices for open units. Property managers across the United States have gushed about how the company’s algorithm boosts profits.
“The beauty of YieldStar is that it pushes you to go places that you wouldn’t have gone if you weren’t using it,” said Kortney Balas, director of revenue management at JVM Realty, referring to RealPage’s software in a testimonial video on the company’s website.
A lot of Bazinga brains are actually like this. I heard endless stories during one of the venture capital booms about extremely intelligent engineers who had never heard of the concept of intellectual property and simply could not be made to understand why they couldn't steal code, ideas, images, text, or anything else from other companies or products. Eventually lawyers had to just tell them "No, or else" because they didn't or could not get it.
It seems like specialists are often so ignorant of various kinds of general knowledge that they can easily get in to all kinds of trouble, especially legal trouble, because they simply never imagined that it might be against the law to fix prices, or fire people because of a protected class, or dump sewage in to a lake.
This isn't an excuse, obviously. For one, there are lawyers whose whole job is to keep this from happening. For another it often just betrays a complete indifference to anything beyond their own immediate interests, a deeply selfish lack of curiousity.
Jeff Bezos Tables Latest Breakthrough Cost-Cutting Idea After Realizing It’s Just Slaves
Exactly. "What do you mean we can't just give people housing and food and not pay them and put armed guards around the perimeter of the housing that we built and own and only allow them to leave for work and never leave the compound?"