7 ms·

It’s not fuzzy. When a group of people get together to determine a common price for goods, that’s collusion… price fixing. They are literally selling price fi

It’s not fuzzy. When a group of people get together to determine a common price for goods, that’s collusion… price fixing. They are literally selling price fixing as a service openly in public. Yes indeed setting prices is difficult. If you use a service to do it for you, it should be quite illegal, and arguably already is. Also the “big” businesses clearly outsource this too, having lived in many large apartment complexes where it was obvious a third party algorithm was doing it.

bluGill 3y ago
The service itself is legal, but you have the difficult task of not using one client's data when working with a different client.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  I don't think it's legal at all. If you're making official pricing recommendations, you're essentially trying to convince competing businesses to agree on price fixing, by definition. It doesn't really matter how you arrive at that recommended price. The only way this could work is if you give individualized pricing recommendations based solely on public information + the information of the specific landlord, and if your marketing and contractual agreements and so on make it very clear that different landlords will see completely unrelated prices. Otherwise, even agreeing on the same pricing formula is an illegal form of price fixing (say, if everyone agrees to sell at public average price + 10%, dropping down to public average price + 5% if unoccupied for one month), per the FTC briefs.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - projektfu 3y ago
    Exactly. If it were just a model, you wouldn't need to ask the cartel to authorize a different price. A model supplier doesn't really care if you use it or not, just that you buy it. But landlords (generally larger owners or operators of large multi-family projects) are paying high fees to the software provider previously because they think it gives them plausible deniability about the cartel behavior.

bluGill 3y ago

The service itself is legal, but you have the difficult task of not using one client's data when working with a different client.

tsimionescu 3y ago
I don't think it's legal at all. If you're making official pricing recommendations, you're essentially trying to convince competing businesses to agree on price fixing, by definition. It doesn't really matter how you arrive at that recommended price. The only way this could work is if you give individualized pricing recommendations based solely on public information + the information of the specific landlord, and if your marketing and contractual agreements and so on make it very clear that different landlords will see completely unrelated prices. Otherwise, even agreeing on the same pricing formula is an illegal form of price fixing (say, if everyone agrees to sell at public average price + 10%, dropping down to public average price + 5% if unoccupied for one month), per the FTC briefs.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- projektfu 3y ago
  Exactly. If it were just a model, you wouldn't need to ask the cartel to authorize a different price. A model supplier doesn't really care if you use it or not, just that you buy it. But landlords (generally larger owners or operators of large multi-family projects) are paying high fees to the software provider previously because they think it gives them plausible deniability about the cartel behavior.