Why Is the Rent So Damn High? The Real Reason Will Shock You

Stop corporate ownership of housing. Stop Blackrock.

Be a shame if someone hacked Realpage into oblivion.

50% of your wage to be allowed a place to sleep = indentured servitude for future generations.

Your rent is so high you can’t afford it and then the supreme court makes homelessness illegal

"We're not price fixing... we're just setting the price and punishing landlords who deviate from it."

I can't wait to hear about the $10 fine they receive for this!

Turn landlords into dirt again

Where I live, average rent is between $1500 and $2000 per month. Pre-pandemic it was $700-$1500 per month. Collusion? Yes.

Seems like the "algorithm" is just an excuse to charge more and blame it on software. Pathetic

The fact that landlords and these megacorps can get constantly caught in this and get slaps on the wrist constantly is depressing

Companies are doing this with salary data too! Please report on that.

Welcome to American Oligarchy. A very few billionaires own congress so force legislation to favor their profit over citizens health safety and welfare.

I hate this. Every time a corporation gets caught they try to settle for way less than they took. I hope they don't settle so we can get accountability and have the company's reputation dragged through the mud for months, then pay out a huge settlement. We need real justice against our corporate captors.

Homelessness would have a profound reduction if we had more housing a full time minimum wage can afford. The people serving and cleaning up after the rich need shelter too.

I've been saying this for years. The "market rent" excuse is a JOKE. It started to occur to me that landlords actually benefit from their neighborly landlord increasing their rent. If they all are in on it, they all get paid and can use "market rent" as an excuse. I remember in about 2018 or 2019 an absolute dump of an apartment complex was talking about $1200/month for a 700 sq.ft 1 bedroom and none of the others in the area were much better. I finally vented about it being wildly unfair and they all wanted to shrug and say "the price is fair because its 'market rent' for the area". They all use "market rent" as an out for taking accountability for what they're actually. None of them ever had an answer when I said "okay so YOU benefit from them hiking their rents up, how do I know y'all aren't all on the same page as far as agreeing to keep the rent sky high so everybody makes out with high rent?" If they hold the line, they win and we are all homeless or begging people to be our roommates in cramped apartments, splitting rent with people we don't even like just to survive.

Be a shame if people started filling their freezers with landlords

What's needed is a rent cap based on the area's median income. I'd sign that petition.

Landlords were never ethical and neither should their punishment

That mention of a 12% increase really caught me off guard because that is EXACTLY the amount my rent was raised last year. And the landlord justified it by claiming it was still competitive when compared to "market rates", which I think has become a coded term indicating this algorithm is being used to price fix entire renter markets.

I got to say this all sounds like a monopoly. Cartel. And it's 100% super illegal.