12 ms·

> await approval Sure seems like RealPage is price fixing then

vel0city 4y ago
The approval wouldn't be from RealPage, it would be from that employee's supervisor. Essentially, one can configure RealPage (and RealPage seems to make this suggestion) to use their auto-price tool by default and require management approvals if employees want to set the price to something else. If I'm buying a Playstation at Walmart, chances are the person at the checkout counter can't change the price directly and give me a discount. They probably can call over a manager who could approve a price change because they can see I'm a really cool person who should get $50 off this Playstation.
- solarmist 4y ago
  No, the article is very clear. There is approvals team that that has to press the button in addition to management. To slow down/increase friction the process even more.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    > There is approvals team that that has to press the button in addition to management. I agree the article is very clear. The approvals team is the management of the property. From the article: > If there is a disagreement between the participating Lessor and the RealPage Pricing Advisor, the dispute is often elevated to the Lessor’s management for resolution, and specific reasons justifying a departure from RealPage’s pricing level are usually required. This snippet is in the "..." from the above comment. Funny they snipped out this extremely critical part of the quote to show who does the approval. Where does it say RealPage employees need to approve the price?
    - notahacker 4y ago
      Both the article and the court filing are unclear about who "the Lessor's management" is, but the Lessor is quite clearly defined as the party which is making property available for lease It's difficult to imagine a reason why a property owner should have to appeal to "management" to vary the prices of their own asset that doesn't involve "management" being an cartel body.
      - vel0city 4y ago
        Yeah, its unclear because the Lessor's management could be a property management company, the ownership of the property, a leasing team supervisor, etc. There's a lot of ways you can set up your property ownership/management/leasing teams, so there wouldn't be a single point to say "the lessor's manager". However, that management is not RealPage.
        notahacker 4y ago
        But, according to the filing, there is a person called a "RealPage Pricing Advisor" who is typically the only party in the loop with the ability to settle the disagreement without seeking further approvals. And it's not exactly a normal arrangement for the "Lessor's employees with pricing responsibility" to have prices dictated to them by a third party company which also sets the Lessor's competitors' prices. Similarly, if that store manager at Walmart you mentioned had to seek approval from the same advisor that does prices for K-mart and Target to adjust the amount on the till, I don't think one could argue that this wasn't price fixing so long as he was still able to get you the discount by petitioning the Walton Family...
        vel0city 4y ago
        > Lessor's employees with pricing responsibility Nowhere in here did it say these people needing to submit the approvals had pricing responsibility. Even if you did have people manually create the prices you'd probably still require your front line leasing agents to submit approvals for listed prices. In this case, those with the pricing responsibility configured their tool to use the algorithmic pricing to automatically set the price instead of manually setting the prices, and deviating from that automatic price requires approval. > who is typically the only party in the loop with the ability to settle the disagreement This is not true as well. If the person does have pricing responsibility, they can just set the price to whatever. If they don't, it gets set to approvals for whoever does, which would probably be someone in that employee's management chain. And by management I mean the leasing company or management company or ownership. Not RealPage. > Similarly, that store manager at Walmart you mentioned should have to seek approval from the same advisor that does prices for K-mart and Target Once again, this isn't requiring approval from the RealPage Pricing Advsior. Nowhere does this article actually state the approval has to come from RealPage or that RealPage actually has the power to block price changes. This is requiring approval from whoever at the property actually has pricing responsibility, whoever that may be. Chances are it isn't the front of line leasing agent though.
    - bbreier 4y ago
      > But RealPage emphasizes the need for discipline among participating Lessors and urges them that for its coordinated algorithmic pricing to be the most successful in increasing rents, participating Lessors must adopt RealPage’s pricing at least 80% of the time.
      - vel0city 4y ago
        Sure, I'm not trying to make any argument here that this is a good system or that it isn't afoul of any antitrust/price fixing or anything along those lines. I'm just stating this idea that many seem to have here that these prices are being enforced behind RealPage support agents manually approving price changes is incorrect. In fact, property managers can choose to just not use this price tool at all, and manually set their prices, which can also require employees to submit approvals for price changes. The whole "await approval" thing isn't the problem, that's just normal for lots of places. Lots of places require some kind of management approval to adjust prices.
        Stealthisbook 4y ago
        The rub is that the suggested pricing is the default that doesn't require extra layers of approval with an included reasoning for deviating. All the pressure is for using the price derived from the proprietary information of other companies-that would be price fixing. It's not the process, so much as the source except that the process is set up to encourage as universal adoption as possible to keep the scam going.
        vel0city 4y ago
        As mentioned elsewhere, chances are even if the property management manually set prices for every unit these same leasing agents would still have to submit approvals for changes to these prices. Its just that those with actual price authority for the building chose to set the prices for those units to be whatever the algorithm suggests by default. Just like the person at the checkout counter can't just arbitrarily sell me a PS5 for $5.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      specific reasons [...] are usually required. By whom? It's rather ambiguous (as is so oftent he case with the passive voice), I can see how you and the other person drew different interpretations.
      - vel0city 4y ago
        From what I gather, this was training for a leasing sales agent. So this would be the reasons why that sales agent thinks this person that's trying to get the lease should get the lease for something other than the list price. Those reasons would then get sent to that agent's management team for approval. Which is good to have those reasons, like "we've been having trouble leasing that corner unit as people are often concerned about road noise, it has been vacant for over six months at current pricing."
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - solarmist 4y ago
      I'm not saying they are DOING anything or a "real" team. It could just be a queue that creates a delay. The objective is to increase the friction to the maximum degree when deviating from the algorithmic pricing. Still, the impression given to the property's management team is that a person (possibly a customer service grunt) is doing some kind of "final review," manually clicking a box or even just making sure they don't drop below 80% acceptance.
      - vel0city 4y ago
        > Still, the impression given to the property's management team is that a person (possibly a customer service grunt) is doing some kind of "final review," manually clicking a box or even just making sure they don't drop below 80% acceptance. Or making sure their leasing agents aren't issuing leases that will lose the company money. If the building's budgets are based around leasing apartments at at least $2/sqft, and leasing agents start issuing leases at $1.50/sqft without anyone else knowing or approving, there's going to be a problem. Those leasing agents aren't always privy (or even care to know) about the budgets of the building. If a waiter starts selling the $5 hamburgers for $1, do you think the business is going to do well? Should the waiter have the ability to arbitrarily decide menu prices?
        solarmist 4y ago
        That isn't at all the same. You could handle that by ensuring the leasing agent's manager sees all the leases going through. This is a cartel going around making sure that all the businesses are playing ball, so they can set prices for everyone how they see fit.
        vel0city 4y ago
        Yeah and you could have the manager at the restaurant inspect everyone's checks or you can just standardize price strategies for the location and auto-approve leases which meet established criteria.
    - jnovek 4y ago
      Wrong paragraph, look at the one above it: > Specifically, every morning, RealPage provides participating Lessors with recommended price levels. Lessors typically must communicate to a RealPage “Pricing Advisor” that they have “accept[ed]” or “confirm[ed] the “approved pricing” within a specified time frame. If Lessors wish to diverge from the “approved pricing” they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval. RealPage encourages participating Lessors to have daily calls between the Lessors’ employees with pricing responsibility and the RealPage Pricing Advisor. So every day an employee at the Lessor must tell a Pricing Advisor -- a flesh-and-blood RealPage employee -- that they accept the pricing provided by RealPage. Further, to reject the pricing, they must explain to the Pricing Advisor why they are rejecting the pricing in writing. It IS confusing because it goes on to say in the following paragraph that said requests also require further approval from a manager at the Lessor.
      - andrewmutz 4y ago
        ...but that's still not approval by Realpage employees. The employees of the property management company do not need realpage approval to change prices from the suggested prices. They need management approval from their own company to do so.
      - vel0city 4y ago
        This is a bit vague, but "wait for approval" here doesn't necessarily mean its the Pricing Advisor that's approving it. I definitely take it to mean its the management approval as mentioned later. Which makes sense, you'd normally want deviances from established prices to be approved by management. Given that it says "If there is a disagreement between the participating Lessor and the RealPage Pricing Advisor..." I'd say the Pricing Advisor isn't able to just wholesale deny it or delay it. As the leasing agent, you'd just choose to deny that price, put in a comment about how its a unit that we haven't been able to move in forever and every tour over the last six months leads to people saying the unit is way overpriced", and then that comment would get sent to your manager for approval or rejection.
        ketzo 4y ago
        How is it vague? > Lessors must communicated to a RealPage pricing advisor that they have accepted or confirmed the approved pricing Okay, so the Lessor is directly communicating with a RealPage employee. >If Lessors wish to diverged from the approved pricing they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval How could this same Lessor be getting approval from anyone other than that employee?
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  First, how do you not have a 'you're posting too fast' cooldown with all the posts you are making on this thread? Second, this isn't playstation though is it? But staying with this example, if I go get a $50 meal my server very much can adjust my bill 'I removed X', 'I comped Y' happens all the time. If I go to a matress store/furniture store the sales person very much has the ability to lower my price arbitrarily on items way more expensive than a Playstation. Your 1 example isn't really all that relevant.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    What, you didn't buy HN Premium+ for the 10x posting rate? J/K, I believe it has something to do with karma level. You still have a pretty low karma amount. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
  - vel0city 4y ago
    > First, how do you not have a 'you're posting too fast' cooldown with all the posts you are making on this thread? I dunno, I definitely have some posts where I have to wait for the reply link to show up to write a reply. > if I go get a $50 meal my server very much can adjust my bill 'I removed X', 'I comped Y' happens all the time. And usually behind the scenes they got a supervisor or manager approval for doing such a thing, or will probably have to explain the deviance from normal pricing later. > If I go to a matress store/furniture store the sales person very much has the ability to lower my price arbitrarily on items way more expensive than a Playstation. Most times that I've negotiated pricing for things (cars, mattresses, etc.) outside of private party the final price was subject to some kind of supervisor/manager approval. I can't think of a single time where the final sale for some negotiated price didn't have some approval process to it. If a business just allows their front of line employees to arbitrarily set prices without any kind of review, their business probably isn't going to do too well. The front of line sales people probably don't have all the information as to why the company is wanting to set the prices a certain way, and without that information they're setting prices rather arbitrarily. This could lead to some pretty massive damages to the company. If a waiter just decides to start only charging $1 for the $5 burgers, the business is going to have a problem.

The approval wouldn't be from RealPage, it would be from that employee's supervisor. Essentially, one can configure RealPage (and RealPage seems to make this suggestion) to use their auto-price tool by default and require management approvals if employees want to set the price to something else. If I'm buying a Playstation at Walmart, chances are the person at the checkout counter can't change the price directly and give me a discount. They probably can call over a manager who could approve a price change because they can see I'm a really cool person who should get $50 off this Playstation.

solarmist 4y ago
No, the article is very clear. There is approvals team that that has to press the button in addition to management. To slow down/increase friction the process even more.
- vel0city 4y ago
  > There is approvals team that that has to press the button in addition to management. I agree the article is very clear. The approvals team is the management of the property. From the article: > If there is a disagreement between the participating Lessor and the RealPage Pricing Advisor, the dispute is often elevated to the Lessor’s management for resolution, and specific reasons justifying a departure from RealPage’s pricing level are usually required. This snippet is in the "..." from the above comment. Funny they snipped out this extremely critical part of the quote to show who does the approval. Where does it say RealPage employees need to approve the price?
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Both the article and the court filing are unclear about who "the Lessor's management" is, but the Lessor is quite clearly defined as the party which is making property available for lease It's difficult to imagine a reason why a property owner should have to appeal to "management" to vary the prices of their own asset that doesn't involve "management" being an cartel body.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      Yeah, its unclear because the Lessor's management could be a property management company, the ownership of the property, a leasing team supervisor, etc. There's a lot of ways you can set up your property ownership/management/leasing teams, so there wouldn't be a single point to say "the lessor's manager". However, that management is not RealPage.
      - notahacker 4y ago
        But, according to the filing, there is a person called a "RealPage Pricing Advisor" who is typically the only party in the loop with the ability to settle the disagreement without seeking further approvals. And it's not exactly a normal arrangement for the "Lessor's employees with pricing responsibility" to have prices dictated to them by a third party company which also sets the Lessor's competitors' prices. Similarly, if that store manager at Walmart you mentioned had to seek approval from the same advisor that does prices for K-mart and Target to adjust the amount on the till, I don't think one could argue that this wasn't price fixing so long as he was still able to get you the discount by petitioning the Walton Family...
        vel0city 4y ago
        > Lessor's employees with pricing responsibility Nowhere in here did it say these people needing to submit the approvals had pricing responsibility. Even if you did have people manually create the prices you'd probably still require your front line leasing agents to submit approvals for listed prices. In this case, those with the pricing responsibility configured their tool to use the algorithmic pricing to automatically set the price instead of manually setting the prices, and deviating from that automatic price requires approval. > who is typically the only party in the loop with the ability to settle the disagreement This is not true as well. If the person does have pricing responsibility, they can just set the price to whatever. If they don't, it gets set to approvals for whoever does, which would probably be someone in that employee's management chain. And by management I mean the leasing company or management company or ownership. Not RealPage. > Similarly, that store manager at Walmart you mentioned should have to seek approval from the same advisor that does prices for K-mart and Target Once again, this isn't requiring approval from the RealPage Pricing Advsior. Nowhere does this article actually state the approval has to come from RealPage or that RealPage actually has the power to block price changes. This is requiring approval from whoever at the property actually has pricing responsibility, whoever that may be. Chances are it isn't the front of line leasing agent though.
  - bbreier 4y ago
    > But RealPage emphasizes the need for discipline among participating Lessors and urges them that for its coordinated algorithmic pricing to be the most successful in increasing rents, participating Lessors must adopt RealPage’s pricing at least 80% of the time.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      Sure, I'm not trying to make any argument here that this is a good system or that it isn't afoul of any antitrust/price fixing or anything along those lines. I'm just stating this idea that many seem to have here that these prices are being enforced behind RealPage support agents manually approving price changes is incorrect. In fact, property managers can choose to just not use this price tool at all, and manually set their prices, which can also require employees to submit approvals for price changes. The whole "await approval" thing isn't the problem, that's just normal for lots of places. Lots of places require some kind of management approval to adjust prices.
      - Stealthisbook 4y ago
        The rub is that the suggested pricing is the default that doesn't require extra layers of approval with an included reasoning for deviating. All the pressure is for using the price derived from the proprietary information of other companies-that would be price fixing. It's not the process, so much as the source except that the process is set up to encourage as universal adoption as possible to keep the scam going.
        vel0city 4y ago
        As mentioned elsewhere, chances are even if the property management manually set prices for every unit these same leasing agents would still have to submit approvals for changes to these prices. Its just that those with actual price authority for the building chose to set the prices for those units to be whatever the algorithm suggests by default. Just like the person at the checkout counter can't just arbitrarily sell me a PS5 for $5.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    specific reasons [...] are usually required. By whom? It's rather ambiguous (as is so oftent he case with the passive voice), I can see how you and the other person drew different interpretations.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      From what I gather, this was training for a leasing sales agent. So this would be the reasons why that sales agent thinks this person that's trying to get the lease should get the lease for something other than the list price. Those reasons would then get sent to that agent's management team for approval. Which is good to have those reasons, like "we've been having trouble leasing that corner unit as people are often concerned about road noise, it has been vacant for over six months at current pricing."
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - solarmist 4y ago
    I'm not saying they are DOING anything or a "real" team. It could just be a queue that creates a delay. The objective is to increase the friction to the maximum degree when deviating from the algorithmic pricing. Still, the impression given to the property's management team is that a person (possibly a customer service grunt) is doing some kind of "final review," manually clicking a box or even just making sure they don't drop below 80% acceptance.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      > Still, the impression given to the property's management team is that a person (possibly a customer service grunt) is doing some kind of "final review," manually clicking a box or even just making sure they don't drop below 80% acceptance. Or making sure their leasing agents aren't issuing leases that will lose the company money. If the building's budgets are based around leasing apartments at at least $2/sqft, and leasing agents start issuing leases at $1.50/sqft without anyone else knowing or approving, there's going to be a problem. Those leasing agents aren't always privy (or even care to know) about the budgets of the building. If a waiter starts selling the $5 hamburgers for $1, do you think the business is going to do well? Should the waiter have the ability to arbitrarily decide menu prices?
      - solarmist 4y ago
        That isn't at all the same. You could handle that by ensuring the leasing agent's manager sees all the leases going through. This is a cartel going around making sure that all the businesses are playing ball, so they can set prices for everyone how they see fit.
        vel0city 4y ago
        Yeah and you could have the manager at the restaurant inspect everyone's checks or you can just standardize price strategies for the location and auto-approve leases which meet established criteria.
  - jnovek 4y ago
    Wrong paragraph, look at the one above it: > Specifically, every morning, RealPage provides participating Lessors with recommended price levels. Lessors typically must communicate to a RealPage “Pricing Advisor” that they have “accept[ed]” or “confirm[ed] the “approved pricing” within a specified time frame. If Lessors wish to diverge from the “approved pricing” they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval. RealPage encourages participating Lessors to have daily calls between the Lessors’ employees with pricing responsibility and the RealPage Pricing Advisor. So every day an employee at the Lessor must tell a Pricing Advisor -- a flesh-and-blood RealPage employee -- that they accept the pricing provided by RealPage. Further, to reject the pricing, they must explain to the Pricing Advisor why they are rejecting the pricing in writing. It IS confusing because it goes on to say in the following paragraph that said requests also require further approval from a manager at the Lessor.
    - andrewmutz 4y ago
      ...but that's still not approval by Realpage employees. The employees of the property management company do not need realpage approval to change prices from the suggested prices. They need management approval from their own company to do so.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      This is a bit vague, but "wait for approval" here doesn't necessarily mean its the Pricing Advisor that's approving it. I definitely take it to mean its the management approval as mentioned later. Which makes sense, you'd normally want deviances from established prices to be approved by management. Given that it says "If there is a disagreement between the participating Lessor and the RealPage Pricing Advisor..." I'd say the Pricing Advisor isn't able to just wholesale deny it or delay it. As the leasing agent, you'd just choose to deny that price, put in a comment about how its a unit that we haven't been able to move in forever and every tour over the last six months leads to people saying the unit is way overpriced", and then that comment would get sent to your manager for approval or rejection.
      - ketzo 4y ago
        How is it vague? > Lessors must communicated to a RealPage pricing advisor that they have accepted or confirmed the approved pricing Okay, so the Lessor is directly communicating with a RealPage employee. >If Lessors wish to diverged from the approved pricing they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval How could this same Lessor be getting approval from anyone other than that employee?
ROTMetro 4y ago
First, how do you not have a 'you're posting too fast' cooldown with all the posts you are making on this thread? Second, this isn't playstation though is it? But staying with this example, if I go get a $50 meal my server very much can adjust my bill 'I removed X', 'I comped Y' happens all the time. If I go to a matress store/furniture store the sales person very much has the ability to lower my price arbitrarily on items way more expensive than a Playstation. Your 1 example isn't really all that relevant.
- pixl97 4y ago
  What, you didn't buy HN Premium+ for the 10x posting rate? J/K, I believe it has something to do with karma level. You still have a pretty low karma amount. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
- vel0city 4y ago
  > First, how do you not have a 'you're posting too fast' cooldown with all the posts you are making on this thread? I dunno, I definitely have some posts where I have to wait for the reply link to show up to write a reply. > if I go get a $50 meal my server very much can adjust my bill 'I removed X', 'I comped Y' happens all the time. And usually behind the scenes they got a supervisor or manager approval for doing such a thing, or will probably have to explain the deviance from normal pricing later. > If I go to a matress store/furniture store the sales person very much has the ability to lower my price arbitrarily on items way more expensive than a Playstation. Most times that I've negotiated pricing for things (cars, mattresses, etc.) outside of private party the final price was subject to some kind of supervisor/manager approval. I can't think of a single time where the final sale for some negotiated price didn't have some approval process to it. If a business just allows their front of line employees to arbitrarily set prices without any kind of review, their business probably isn't going to do too well. The front of line sales people probably don't have all the information as to why the company is wanting to set the prices a certain way, and without that information they're setting prices rather arbitrarily. This could lead to some pretty massive damages to the company. If a waiter just decides to start only charging $1 for the $5 burgers, the business is going to have a problem.