It would be nice to read an article about this from an econ standpoint. Is it really possible for this yieldstar “algorithm” to convince independent actors to a

It would be nice to read an article about this from an econ standpoint. Is it really possible for this yieldstar “algorithm” to convince independent actors to agree to lower their occupancy rate in return for higher average income? It seems like they’re analogizing this to a monopoly, where one entity controls all the assets so it can raise prices and still sell. But in this case if you’re one landlord at 80% occupancy with high prices, it’s a prisoners dilemma and you’d just make more money if you lowered rates a bit. I guess one explanation would be that yieldstar had leverage over the landlords. If it said “it’s all or nothing, either you blindly follow our pricing model or you are on your own” then perhaps the benefits outweigh the costs. But that’s not the claim in these lawsuits though, they’re just arguing that “landlords used the algorithm price 90% of the time”. This might just be indicative that the algorithm is good at pricing housing. Asa side note, the article covers another explanation for high vacancy rates - developers building huge apartments with loan structures that have penalties if rents don’t hit targets. So they’d rather leave units unoccupied and stay in business instead of lowering rents to make money. But why would the lenders agree to such a stupid structure? I don’t know if I can believe that either. Overall I’m inclined to believe a simpler story that inflation has been really high, housing demand outpaced supply, and yieldstar helped determine optimal prices in this dynamic market. As for why occupancy % has gone down, I think it’s a really specific story of how these new huge “luxury” (in extreme quotes) buildings are managed. They just try to keep liquidity high so that they can rent out 3-6 months in advance, which high-payers really like. From a pro publica article on the same story: “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.” This man should be shot