“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.
One of the greatest threats to a landlord’s profit, according to Roper and other executives, was other firms setting rents too low at nearby properties. “If you have idiots undervaluing, it costs the whole system,” Roper said.
This guy got his start price-fixing for airlines.
At one point, federal agents removed a computer and documents from Roper’s office at the airline. He said he and other creators of the software weren’t aware of the antitrust implications. “We all got called up before the Department of Justice in the early 1980s because we were colluding,” he said. “We had no idea.”
. . .
The practice of lowering rent to fill a vacancy was a reflex for many in the apartment industry. Letting units sit empty could be costly and nerve-wracking for leasing agents.
Such agents sometimes hesitated to push rents higher. Roper said they were often peers of the people they were renting to. “We said there’s way too much empathy going on here,” he said. “This is one of the reasons we wanted to get pricing off-site.”
I hate this person so, so much.
It's not collusion if you just pass all the communications through a computer in the middle. Everyone knows that.
Anyway, notice he just switched industries and is doing exactly the same thing. What a shock that they'll just find a way to hide it a little better.
It's funny that they'll make arguments for that thinking they're so clever and smart, but it's the exact opposite of what anyone even close to an expert would think. Like of course algorithms aren't naturally unbiased and apolitical.
le algorithm being nonpolitical.
Germany famously using early IBM computers to facilitate the Holocaust.
But Maureen K. Ohlhausen, who was then the acting chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said in a 2017 talk that it could be problematic if a group of competitors all used the same outside firm’s algorithm to maximize prices across a market.
She suggested substituting “a guy named Bob” everywhere the word algorithm appears.
“Is it OK for a guy named Bob to collect confidential price strategy information from all the participants in a market and then tell everybody how they should price?” she said. “If it isn’t OK for a guy named Bob to do it, then it probably isn’t OK for an algorithm to do it either.”
Through a representative, Ohlhausen declined to comment on RealPage.
Great to hear such opposition to an idea from someone who would have been able to do something about it but didn't.
Trump named her acting chairperson, but it will not surprise anyone here to learn that she first joined the FTC under Obama.
I mean they're literally just forming a cartel with a level or two of obfuscation.
We said there’s way too much empathy going on here,”
:guts-rage:
“We had no idea.”
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.
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?"
What of I told you there was a greater threat to a landlord's profit? :mao-aggro-shining:
"I thought this action was morally wrong and indefensible, but this robot relieved me of the pains of responsibility and conscience by telling me it was the correct thing to do!"
Man-made horrors, etc etc.
“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.
:gulag:
I should probably have put a CW for people with high blood pressure. It's bad and each paragraph is worse than the last. Death to America.
Literally bragging about how they've innovated the guilt out of exploitation
I wish there was a secret revolution algorithm to put an end to landlords
I mean feudalism, kind of, especially in it's worst forms in like Russia and Poland.
"Give me everything you produce except only what you need to survive at the barest level. And if you don't I'll brutalize and maybe even kill you".
Is there any historical precedent for the insanity of modern day housing/rent prices?
Victorian Era Europe, maybe. Literally can't get land at any price, as the aristocracy has fully monopolized real estate. People are doing adventurism to steal land a continent or more away, because new real estate is so highly coveted.
People are doing adventurism to steal land a continent or more away, because new real estate is so highly coveted.
or like my czech family back then, running off to the mountains and killing tax men that show up with all the other villagers and building their own house on illegally occupied land
Latin America. The landowners have even more power than they do in the US in some countries.
More and more I become a Luddite when capital uses algorithms to increase the cruelty
I reread this once a month or so, it seems like:
As if they wouldn't do that without an algo to take the blame. Nobody was stopping them before they automated it, why would they now?
It's actually a thing that when people feel they have permission they'll do things they otherwise wouldn't. Like individually someone might be like "That's wrong, I won't do it" but if they're given and order or someone in authority tells them it's okay, or in this case if a robot says it's the optimum play, a lot of people will do it.
Strong morals and ethics aren't really all that common, and even people who do have personal morals and ethics will fall victim to things like diffusion of responsibility. Like soldiers who say "Well I didn't kill anyone, I just worked in the motor pool. Yes, the tank I repaired blew up an orphanage, but I'm too far away from that action to feel that I am personally responsible for it, so I'll keep repairing tanks".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility#Moral_disengagement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation_bias
And the great part is, not even being aware of this glitch lets you avoid falling for it! In fact, it makes you assume you already planned around it even when you haven’t!
You are a flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters!
Try it now! the System Offering yoU Legal Leniency on Ethical Situations Supreme has extensive legal databases and morality systems that it can counter-cross-reference in order to give you the most inhumane but still legal course of action on any decision both personal and professional. Buy now and we will throw in the S.O.U.L.L.E.S.S. Power of Attorney upgrade For FREE! SOULESS PoA makes any recommended advice legally binding so even if you have stinging's of conscious you are legally powerless to do anything about it. Sign all your ethical quandries away RIGHT NOW and watch that line go UP! :stonks-up:
