9 ms·

So, I view this case as likely unsettled under current US antitrust law. The underlying behavior seems really objectionable and should be illegal. The questio

So, I view this case as likely unsettled under current US antitrust law. The underlying behavior seems really objectionable and should be illegal. The question is whether it is actually illegal under the law. If a bunch of firms use the same software to set prices but do so independently and without any attempt to coordinate with each other… that’s a pretty decent defense? (Can they argue that they had no knowledge of their competitors’ use of the software? There may of course be internal emails saying “we know X is also using it.” Suppose there aren’t AND the software vendor promised exclusivity to all of them independently. Would we want this to be illegal? What if all of the firms offer similar products and set prices by estimating the same demand curve?? This becomes a little far fetched of course.) I don’t view this as obviously “per se illegal” territory. I would love to be wrong bc yeah it’s really objectionable, but I don’t think the case is a slam dunk. So called “algorithmic collusion” of which this is likely an example is an unsettled area of theory

ethanbond 3y ago
They did coordinate: the software had a policy that you had to take their recommendation at least n% of the time (I think 80?) Edit: Per discussion below, it was merely strongly encouraged and effectively followed (in practice) to take the recommendation at least 80% of the time... in order to raise prices together...
- bombcar 3y ago
  This might end up being the lynchpin - the software sounds like a textbook cartel.
  - mcmoor 3y ago
    This fact either make it 100% a cartel or is actually false and keep being repeated on HN for some reason.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  I don't think that is true from reading the complaint - there wasnt any mandatory requirement, but guidelines on how to use the algorithm.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    https://www.hausfeld.com/media/550bhzyp/realpage-complaint-filed.pdf https://www.hausfeld.com/media/550bhzyp/realpage-complaint-f... Paragraph 7
    - svnt 3y ago
      “As one Lessor explains, while ‘we are all technically competitors’ RealPage ‘helps us work together’” “RealPage explains that for its services to be most effective in increasing rents, Lessors must accept the pricing at least 80 percent of the time” Yeah this is collusion.
      - jlarocco 3y ago
        "Collusion as a service." The clients have plausible deniability because how can they know if everybody else is using it, and the service provider is "just a recommendation", so they're not guilty either. If it's not ruled illegal (and it should be) then it seems like a great business model to copy in other markets.
        svnt 3y ago
        They know that it works by competitors “working together”, it doesn’t matter whether they communicate via language or through prices combined with a service that both explains how it works and dictates how they all behave.
        DannyBee 3y ago
        One piece of confusion here is that you do not actually have to prove a literal explicit agreement between the parties to be successful. While tacit collusion is not itself illegal, conspiracy is. Put another way: You can prohibit folks from agreeing not to compete, no matter what form that agreement takes. You don't have to know who you are avoiding competition with, etc However you can't order people to compete just because they aren't
_jal 3y ago
The landlords were clearly communicating pricing information to one another with the intent of profit maximization. I don't see how software mediation changes that.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  What you just said is 100% legal, and occurs in every market. What makes it collusion is if they come to agreements about pricing information.
  - sklargh 3y ago
    IANAL, and perhaps you are but I don’t believe it is 100% legal. Seems like a matter of degree. What the parent is describing could reasonably be construed as illegal signaling and/or pricing collusion if the market is itself the mechanism for collusion. There will be some interesting internal emails. Good overview of signaling here - https://www.jonesday.com/-/media/files/publications/2016/09/sending-the-wrong-message-antitrust-liability-for/files/fall16-renderc/fileattachment/fall16renderc.pdf?rev=780423be4f914b7598419368a13a7027 https://www.jonesday.com/-/media/files/publications/2016/09/...
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      I can go to a variety of hotel/airline/retail/stock brokers/etc websites right now and get prices. Why would that be illegal? Doing it secretly would invite scrutiny and reason to issue subpoenas though.
      - sklargh 3y ago
        It wouldn’t be. Using a tool as a collusive mechanism to set prices jointly or create a price floor would be though.
  - mox1 3y ago
    So if these landlords all got together every Monday and discussed detailed pricing / sales info that would be 100% legal? What would be the purpose of this meeting other than to make implicit pricing agreements? Does anti-trust law explicitly require a written / verbal agreement or does doing lots of things that looks like agreeing (without actually agreeing) count?
chank 3y ago
> If a bunch of firms use the same software to set prices but do so independently and without any attempt to coordinate with each other… that’s a pretty decent defense? The software enabled coordination without rental management companies/owners needing to put in effort to do so. In the end all they cared about was maxamizing profits which in itself isn't illegal no matter how unethical it might be. The key here is proving that they knew what was going on. I'm sure they did all things considered. It's been going on for years.
- junofan 3y ago
  If prices went up and occupancy went down, it would be difficult to claim otherwise. Why let units sit empty?
  - _AzMoo 3y ago
    The argument here (not saying I agree with it) is that it's common to let units sit empty over particular periods, based on other business decisions and an understanding of the market. eg, If you have a lease that ends in September, the make ready process takes 2-4 weeks, so the unit will be available for lease again in October. There's not a high churn of residents in October-December due to holiday periods, etc. and demand doesn't pick up again until January. Therefore, it's better for you to let that unit sit empty now, because demand is so much lower for the next 2-3 months you won't be able to get the same increase in lease price as you will when demand skyrockets in January. Another example is an understanding that some kind of amenity will change over a period. eg, a new public transport route is going in, or the property next door is being rezoned and demolished, from an industrial site to a commercial precinct, and so waiting for that to happen means that you can get a higher price on your lease once that happens, to the extent that it will offset the loss from leaving the unit vacant. The defendants will argue that the analysis provided by the plaintiff doesn't consider these kinds of business decisions and that this part of the argument should be considered flawed.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Vacancy rates nationwide are near all time lows. I’d need more evidence to accept that occupancy went down or landlords left units empty.
s1artibartfast 3y ago
I think part of the case is a slam dunk. RealPage offers multiple services. One where RealPage gives you a recommended price and you are free to choose whatever price you want. They might ask you something along the lines of "why didnt you use our price?", but nothing is binding. This is like kelly blue book or a price consultant for apartments. The other is the AutoPilot feature, where RealPage "takes the wheel" and set/publishes the listing price for you based on their model. The property owner is out of the loop, and RealPage is a single entity setting all of the prices for the subscribers. I think the first case is pretty clearly legal, and the second has some valid concerns. The point of both services is to help landlords maximize profit, but that isnt illegal by itself.
- AlphaSite 3y ago
  I dont think it’s quite blue book, because it’s personalised to that property, right? It’s probably the personalisation that really differentiates it and I suspect it’s models are also design to show maximum value rather than average price, so they move the market, rather than just reporting on it.
renewiltord 3y ago
Haha, that's such an easy way to get around this thing. I'd just set up an LLC called "Price Advisor LLC" and instead of a cartel, we'd all just go to Price Advisor LLC and ask "what should I set it at?" and then Price Advisor LLC can just run the cartel. This is hilarious. I can enable full anti-trust myself out of a one-man LLC by just "using comparables".
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Isn’t this what happens every trading day for Apple stock (and others)? I couldn’t begin to hazard a guess as to what a share of Apple “should be” worth, but if I do a little electronic research, I now have the advice that “around $190/share” is probably right. Did I collude just there?
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    there is a difference between doing research when selling vs. asking a company for advice and being required to take their price at least 80% of the time. there is also the issue of market concentration. generally speaking in a regular, healthy market many people hold stock and possibly undercut each other. In financial cases where there is actual price fixing going on (e.g. LIBOR) there has been a lot of prosecution.
  - brasic 3y ago
    The research you do in that scenario would just tell you the prices which shares had actually changed hands at. A decentralized market-based price discovery mechanism cannot be considered collusion or price fixing, since it’s exactly the opposite.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    No, because it's decentralized. The Price Advisor LLC is sort of important there. e.g. take a cartel that you genuinely think is a cartel. Now instead of them all colluding, imagine that they set up Price Advisor LLC, and that no two of them ever talk to each other to set prices. All price setting is done by Price Advisor LLC. Moving the price setting into this LLC does not make the operation not a cartel. The LLC saying it's "checking comparables" does not make it not a cartel. After all, if a legitimate cartel could dodge this by just making a new LLC, then it would almost always make sense to cartelize because you can always act as a cartel without being considered a cartel for the cost of $500.
sinistersnare 3y ago
I believe that the matter of their defense is irrelevant. The truth is that real people were harmed by this, and they deserve reparations today. As to who pays, it must be the landlords. This is the supposed 'risk' they take on by being landlords, which everyone tells me is so great to bear. Also to get on a soap-box, this is the truth of reparations, it is not in relation to a single event, it is an attempt to solve injustices that exist institutionally in our world today.
- racketcon2089 3y ago
  This approach is at odds with rule of law and historically has not redressed injustices but rather created societies where power is even more concentrated and even less accountable. The primary purpose of any and all reparations rhetoric in the US today is to divide the electorate by anything other than economic position in order to maintain a status quo whose legitimacy is beginning to erode. And it's working quite well, since you're delivering grandiose proclamations while advocating for nihilism and ignorance towards the existing legal processes that will actually impact the lives of millions of people in the coming years.
  - sinistersnare 3y ago
    I agree that contemporary rhetoric on reparations is quite poor. But, scholars today agree that reparations are a way of understanding our government's position on change and not on giving money to people (Reconsidering Reparations by Olufemi Taiwo is about this). You give some good stuff to think about with the historical point, but I still believe it must be tried again, and better this time. So I don't discount the legal processes, I am saying they must be changed. That is how we can actually solve issues like this, instead of simply putting a band-aid on each time we have systemic issues like this. I find myself to be an anti-nihilist as a matter of fact. Reparations is not an _ideal_ for which I have grounded in nothingness (nihilism). Reparations must be a state of being for our government, whose material being should be solving injustice and not propagating it.
    - gosub100 3y ago
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> The question is whether it is actually illegal under the law... This has become a painfully, utterly common trope on Hacker News. The Sherman Anti-Trust act is one paragraph long. It doesn't attract the same spirited interest from judges as the constitutional amendments do, which are even shorter. Judges and Justices have been writing the law on those for a long, long time, including reversing their own precedents, "ignoring" case law - really just fucking disagreeing with the past. To hell with case law. > underlying behavior seems really objectionable and should be illegal This is what matters. At the end of the day, if the government wants to win these cases, it's not going to be by making RealPage look bad - one kind of tomfoolery - or by stare decisis - another kind of tomfoolery. Judges and Justices are writing anti-trust law. So give them some good fucking propaganda. Make them give a single utter fuck about something as utterly god damned dull as this. Align it with their political opinions, because that is what decides these cases. The same thing is true about the Google case. The FTC doesn't even care about advertising. The DoJ doesn't care about apartment pricing. The underlying problem is that the people litigating this have no passion about the thing whatsoever, they are way too big picture "company bad" and don't have much else to go on.
- lozenge 3y ago
  Yes, there is no such thing, philosophically speaking, as "actually illegal". The law is not a platonic ideal, it's constructed in every court ruling.
- TheCoelacanth 3y ago
  If you actually applied the laws as written, it would be about a million times stricter than what we actually enforce. These things are explicitly listed as illegal: * conspiring in restraint of trade * price discrimination between different purchasers if such a discrimination substantially lessens competition * sales on the condition that the buyer or lessee not deal with the competitors of the seller or lessor * mergers and acquisitions where the effect may substantially lessen competition
Exoristos 3y ago
What a puerile defense. The medium of collusion is irrelevant to the intent of the laws, as is its novelty.
mox1 3y ago
So my partner is in hr for a large firm. There was 3 day event last year where a bunch of her and peer companies got together with a middle person to “level set” and share aggregate salary data. The entire point of the event was to ensure incoming data to the salary aggregation company was sound. They wait 2-4 months for a report / dstabase and they can now lookup industry salary by level and function. Its super accurate because they all go together beforehand to ensure that! Id be shocked if the same thing wasnt happening here. No need to collude / conspire on actual offers when you already have super accurate aggregate pricing information, you already know what your competitors are going to be asking for like properties, price a little up or down.
- twoodfin 3y ago
  This kind of “price discovery” (for labor in this case) is perfectly legal. Plenty of markets have “liquid” pricing and don’t need vendors to provide discovery, yet corresponding cartels don’t emerge on this fact alone. What made a difference in cases like the Silicon Valley anti-poaching regime was direct anti-competitive action: Hiring away Apple Engineer A would be good for me, but I won’t because I’ll get an angry phone call from Steve Jobs and face potential retribution. The crux of a case like this is whether RealPage was merely facilitating market-making price discovery (good all on its own for maximizing landlord profits—legally!) or was explicitly or implicitly creating incentives for landlords to act against their individual interest in favor of the collective interest.
DannyBee 3y ago
Lawyer here. Hard disagree. The software is sold for the purpose of reducing competition, and gives advice on how to best achieve that. Everyone colluding is buying and using the software with a goal of not competing with each other. That is just about a textbook case. You can remove the software. Imagine you all pay someone to write a number on a piece of paper that gets posted on a light pole once a month. You don't get a say what the number is, but you all agree to set prices at that number 80% of the time. This is illegal. Even if you remove the 80% and say "we recommend you use this number 80% of the time to maximize your non competition", it would be illegal This is not a close case. Fixing the price this way is illegal. Agreeing not to compete at all is illegal. It does not matter if you get someone else to set the price. At the point you all agree not to compete, you've clearly violated the act. As for whether it's per-se illegal, per-se illegal went out the window on basically all illegal acts under the sherman act over the past few decades, except a few remaining forms of price-fixing. But you would still win the cases under the rule of reason anyway, and it would not be close there either. People seem really hung up on whether they agreed with each other explicitly. They don't have to. Conspiracy suffices. Tacit agreement is not illegal, but it has to be truly tacit. This is not. As I said elsewhere: it is illegal for them to conspire to not compete matter what the form of the conspiracy. However if they just aren't competing, you can't order them to compete. This is a clear case of the former - they are conspiring towards a common non competition goal. They knew what would happen if they conspired this way. It's like trying to avoid a conspiracy to commit murder charge by saying you never explicitly agreed to hire a particular hitman, you instead just followed the directions some software gave you when it said "in order to maximize the possibility of your husband being dead, we recommend depositing at least five million at the following address". Good luck with your claim that you didn't agree to anything with anyone - you were just maximizing some probabilities. Hell, i bet when they do discovery the company has not been as careful as they think, and there are chats/emails about how successfully they've been able to destroy competition or raise prices or whatever. Because there always is.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- adolph 3y ago
  Is the Sherman Antitrust Act the legal basis for the lawsuit against the software company? The Sherman Antitrust Act seems to deal with interstate commerce. Clearly the software is sold in many states. Some rental markets are multi-state. Some apartment management companies are multi-state. Would it apply to those rental markets and management companies that are not interstate?

ethanbond 3y ago

They did coordinate: the software had a policy that you had to take their recommendation at least n% of the time (I think 80?) Edit: Per discussion below, it was merely strongly encouraged and effectively followed (in practice) to take the recommendation at least 80% of the time... in order to raise prices together...

bombcar 3y ago
This might end up being the lynchpin - the software sounds like a textbook cartel.
- mcmoor 3y ago
  This fact either make it 100% a cartel or is actually false and keep being repeated on HN for some reason.
s1artibartfast 3y ago
I don't think that is true from reading the complaint - there wasnt any mandatory requirement, but guidelines on how to use the algorithm.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  https://www.hausfeld.com/media/550bhzyp/realpage-complaint-filed.pdf https://www.hausfeld.com/media/550bhzyp/realpage-complaint-f... Paragraph 7
  - svnt 3y ago
    “As one Lessor explains, while ‘we are all technically competitors’ RealPage ‘helps us work together’” “RealPage explains that for its services to be most effective in increasing rents, Lessors must accept the pricing at least 80 percent of the time” Yeah this is collusion.
    - jlarocco 3y ago
      "Collusion as a service." The clients have plausible deniability because how can they know if everybody else is using it, and the service provider is "just a recommendation", so they're not guilty either. If it's not ruled illegal (and it should be) then it seems like a great business model to copy in other markets.
      - svnt 3y ago
        They know that it works by competitors “working together”, it doesn’t matter whether they communicate via language or through prices combined with a service that both explains how it works and dictates how they all behave.
      - DannyBee 3y ago
        One piece of confusion here is that you do not actually have to prove a literal explicit agreement between the parties to be successful. While tacit collusion is not itself illegal, conspiracy is. Put another way: You can prohibit folks from agreeing not to compete, no matter what form that agreement takes. You don't have to know who you are avoiding competition with, etc However you can't order people to compete just because they aren't

_jal 3y ago

The landlords were clearly communicating pricing information to one another with the intent of profit maximization. I don't see how software mediation changes that.

s1artibartfast 3y ago
What you just said is 100% legal, and occurs in every market. What makes it collusion is if they come to agreements about pricing information.
- sklargh 3y ago
  IANAL, and perhaps you are but I don’t believe it is 100% legal. Seems like a matter of degree. What the parent is describing could reasonably be construed as illegal signaling and/or pricing collusion if the market is itself the mechanism for collusion. There will be some interesting internal emails. Good overview of signaling here - https://www.jonesday.com/-/media/files/publications/2016/09/sending-the-wrong-message-antitrust-liability-for/files/fall16-renderc/fileattachment/fall16renderc.pdf?rev=780423be4f914b7598419368a13a7027 https://www.jonesday.com/-/media/files/publications/2016/09/...
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    I can go to a variety of hotel/airline/retail/stock brokers/etc websites right now and get prices. Why would that be illegal? Doing it secretly would invite scrutiny and reason to issue subpoenas though.
    - sklargh 3y ago
      It wouldn’t be. Using a tool as a collusive mechanism to set prices jointly or create a price floor would be though.
- mox1 3y ago
  So if these landlords all got together every Monday and discussed detailed pricing / sales info that would be 100% legal? What would be the purpose of this meeting other than to make implicit pricing agreements? Does anti-trust law explicitly require a written / verbal agreement or does doing lots of things that looks like agreeing (without actually agreeing) count?

chank 3y ago

> If a bunch of firms use the same software to set prices but do so independently and without any attempt to coordinate with each other… that’s a pretty decent defense? The software enabled coordination without rental management companies/owners needing to put in effort to do so. In the end all they cared about was maxamizing profits which in itself isn't illegal no matter how unethical it might be. The key here is proving that they knew what was going on. I'm sure they did all things considered. It's been going on for years.

junofan 3y ago
If prices went up and occupancy went down, it would be difficult to claim otherwise. Why let units sit empty?
- _AzMoo 3y ago
  The argument here (not saying I agree with it) is that it's common to let units sit empty over particular periods, based on other business decisions and an understanding of the market. eg, If you have a lease that ends in September, the make ready process takes 2-4 weeks, so the unit will be available for lease again in October. There's not a high churn of residents in October-December due to holiday periods, etc. and demand doesn't pick up again until January. Therefore, it's better for you to let that unit sit empty now, because demand is so much lower for the next 2-3 months you won't be able to get the same increase in lease price as you will when demand skyrockets in January. Another example is an understanding that some kind of amenity will change over a period. eg, a new public transport route is going in, or the property next door is being rezoned and demolished, from an industrial site to a commercial precinct, and so waiting for that to happen means that you can get a higher price on your lease once that happens, to the extent that it will offset the loss from leaving the unit vacant. The defendants will argue that the analysis provided by the plaintiff doesn't consider these kinds of business decisions and that this part of the argument should be considered flawed.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Vacancy rates nationwide are near all time lows. I’d need more evidence to accept that occupancy went down or landlords left units empty.

s1artibartfast 3y ago

I think part of the case is a slam dunk. RealPage offers multiple services. One where RealPage gives you a recommended price and you are free to choose whatever price you want. They might ask you something along the lines of "why didnt you use our price?", but nothing is binding. This is like kelly blue book or a price consultant for apartments. The other is the AutoPilot feature, where RealPage "takes the wheel" and set/publishes the listing price for you based on their model. The property owner is out of the loop, and RealPage is a single entity setting all of the prices for the subscribers. I think the first case is pretty clearly legal, and the second has some valid concerns. The point of both services is to help landlords maximize profit, but that isnt illegal by itself.

AlphaSite 3y ago
I dont think it’s quite blue book, because it’s personalised to that property, right? It’s probably the personalisation that really differentiates it and I suspect it’s models are also design to show maximum value rather than average price, so they move the market, rather than just reporting on it.

renewiltord 3y ago

Haha, that's such an easy way to get around this thing. I'd just set up an LLC called "Price Advisor LLC" and instead of a cartel, we'd all just go to Price Advisor LLC and ask "what should I set it at?" and then Price Advisor LLC can just run the cartel. This is hilarious. I can enable full anti-trust myself out of a one-man LLC by just "using comparables".

sokoloff 3y ago
Isn’t this what happens every trading day for Apple stock (and others)? I couldn’t begin to hazard a guess as to what a share of Apple “should be” worth, but if I do a little electronic research, I now have the advice that “around $190/share” is probably right. Did I collude just there?
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  there is a difference between doing research when selling vs. asking a company for advice and being required to take their price at least 80% of the time. there is also the issue of market concentration. generally speaking in a regular, healthy market many people hold stock and possibly undercut each other. In financial cases where there is actual price fixing going on (e.g. LIBOR) there has been a lot of prosecution.
- brasic 3y ago
  The research you do in that scenario would just tell you the prices which shares had actually changed hands at. A decentralized market-based price discovery mechanism cannot be considered collusion or price fixing, since it’s exactly the opposite.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  No, because it's decentralized. The Price Advisor LLC is sort of important there. e.g. take a cartel that you genuinely think is a cartel. Now instead of them all colluding, imagine that they set up Price Advisor LLC, and that no two of them ever talk to each other to set prices. All price setting is done by Price Advisor LLC. Moving the price setting into this LLC does not make the operation not a cartel. The LLC saying it's "checking comparables" does not make it not a cartel. After all, if a legitimate cartel could dodge this by just making a new LLC, then it would almost always make sense to cartelize because you can always act as a cartel without being considered a cartel for the cost of $500.

sinistersnare 3y ago

I believe that the matter of their defense is irrelevant. The truth is that real people were harmed by this, and they deserve reparations today. As to who pays, it must be the landlords. This is the supposed 'risk' they take on by being landlords, which everyone tells me is so great to bear. Also to get on a soap-box, this is the truth of reparations, it is not in relation to a single event, it is an attempt to solve injustices that exist institutionally in our world today.

racketcon2089 3y ago
This approach is at odds with rule of law and historically has not redressed injustices but rather created societies where power is even more concentrated and even less accountable. The primary purpose of any and all reparations rhetoric in the US today is to divide the electorate by anything other than economic position in order to maintain a status quo whose legitimacy is beginning to erode. And it's working quite well, since you're delivering grandiose proclamations while advocating for nihilism and ignorance towards the existing legal processes that will actually impact the lives of millions of people in the coming years.
- sinistersnare 3y ago
  I agree that contemporary rhetoric on reparations is quite poor. But, scholars today agree that reparations are a way of understanding our government's position on change and not on giving money to people (Reconsidering Reparations by Olufemi Taiwo is about this). You give some good stuff to think about with the historical point, but I still believe it must be tried again, and better this time. So I don't discount the legal processes, I am saying they must be changed. That is how we can actually solve issues like this, instead of simply putting a band-aid on each time we have systemic issues like this. I find myself to be an anti-nihilist as a matter of fact. Reparations is not an _ideal_ for which I have grounded in nothingness (nihilism). Reparations must be a state of being for our government, whose material being should be solving injustice and not propagating it.
  - gosub100 3y ago

doctorpangloss 3y ago

> The question is whether it is actually illegal under the law... This has become a painfully, utterly common trope on Hacker News. The Sherman Anti-Trust act is one paragraph long. It doesn't attract the same spirited interest from judges as the constitutional amendments do, which are even shorter. Judges and Justices have been writing the law on those for a long, long time, including reversing their own precedents, "ignoring" case law - really just fucking disagreeing with the past. To hell with case law. > underlying behavior seems really objectionable and should be illegal This is what matters. At the end of the day, if the government wants to win these cases, it's not going to be by making RealPage look bad - one kind of tomfoolery - or by stare decisis - another kind of tomfoolery. Judges and Justices are writing anti-trust law. So give them some good fucking propaganda. Make them give a single utter fuck about something as utterly god damned dull as this. Align it with their political opinions, because that is what decides these cases. The same thing is true about the Google case. The FTC doesn't even care about advertising. The DoJ doesn't care about apartment pricing. The underlying problem is that the people litigating this have no passion about the thing whatsoever, they are way too big picture "company bad" and don't have much else to go on.

lozenge 3y ago
Yes, there is no such thing, philosophically speaking, as "actually illegal". The law is not a platonic ideal, it's constructed in every court ruling.
TheCoelacanth 3y ago
If you actually applied the laws as written, it would be about a million times stricter than what we actually enforce. These things are explicitly listed as illegal: * conspiring in restraint of trade * price discrimination between different purchasers if such a discrimination substantially lessens competition * sales on the condition that the buyer or lessee not deal with the competitors of the seller or lessor * mergers and acquisitions where the effect may substantially lessen competition

Exoristos 3y ago

What a puerile defense. The medium of collusion is irrelevant to the intent of the laws, as is its novelty.

mox1 3y ago

So my partner is in hr for a large firm. There was 3 day event last year where a bunch of her and peer companies got together with a middle person to “level set” and share aggregate salary data. The entire point of the event was to ensure incoming data to the salary aggregation company was sound. They wait 2-4 months for a report / dstabase and they can now lookup industry salary by level and function. Its super accurate because they all go together beforehand to ensure that! Id be shocked if the same thing wasnt happening here. No need to collude / conspire on actual offers when you already have super accurate aggregate pricing information, you already know what your competitors are going to be asking for like properties, price a little up or down.

twoodfin 3y ago
This kind of “price discovery” (for labor in this case) is perfectly legal. Plenty of markets have “liquid” pricing and don’t need vendors to provide discovery, yet corresponding cartels don’t emerge on this fact alone. What made a difference in cases like the Silicon Valley anti-poaching regime was direct anti-competitive action: Hiring away Apple Engineer A would be good for me, but I won’t because I’ll get an angry phone call from Steve Jobs and face potential retribution. The crux of a case like this is whether RealPage was merely facilitating market-making price discovery (good all on its own for maximizing landlord profits—legally!) or was explicitly or implicitly creating incentives for landlords to act against their individual interest in favor of the collective interest.

DannyBee 3y ago

Lawyer here. Hard disagree. The software is sold for the purpose of reducing competition, and gives advice on how to best achieve that. Everyone colluding is buying and using the software with a goal of not competing with each other. That is just about a textbook case. You can remove the software. Imagine you all pay someone to write a number on a piece of paper that gets posted on a light pole once a month. You don't get a say what the number is, but you all agree to set prices at that number 80% of the time. This is illegal. Even if you remove the 80% and say "we recommend you use this number 80% of the time to maximize your non competition", it would be illegal This is not a close case. Fixing the price this way is illegal. Agreeing not to compete at all is illegal. It does not matter if you get someone else to set the price. At the point you all agree not to compete, you've clearly violated the act. As for whether it's per-se illegal, per-se illegal went out the window on basically all illegal acts under the sherman act over the past few decades, except a few remaining forms of price-fixing. But you would still win the cases under the rule of reason anyway, and it would not be close there either. People seem really hung up on whether they agreed with each other explicitly. They don't have to. Conspiracy suffices. Tacit agreement is not illegal, but it has to be truly tacit. This is not. As I said elsewhere: it is illegal for them to conspire to not compete matter what the form of the conspiracy. However if they just aren't competing, you can't order them to compete. This is a clear case of the former - they are conspiring towards a common non competition goal. They knew what would happen if they conspired this way. It's like trying to avoid a conspiracy to commit murder charge by saying you never explicitly agreed to hire a particular hitman, you instead just followed the directions some software gave you when it said "in order to maximize the possibility of your husband being dead, we recommend depositing at least five million at the following address". Good luck with your claim that you didn't agree to anything with anyone - you were just maximizing some probabilities. Hell, i bet when they do discovery the company has not been as careful as they think, and there are chats/emails about how successfully they've been able to destroy competition or raise prices or whatever. Because there always is.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
adolph 3y ago
Is the Sherman Antitrust Act the legal basis for the lawsuit against the software company? The Sherman Antitrust Act seems to deal with interstate commerce. Clearly the software is sold in many states. Some rental markets are multi-state. Some apartment management companies are multi-state. Would it apply to those rental markets and management companies that are not interstate?