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supply in order to push up prices.
In an email to ProPublica, RealPage dismissed the notion that the
company was using market data improperly.
The company said that using actual rents helps the company "capture a
truer picture of price elasticity and affordability," which reduces
the odds a unit is overpriced. And the lease transaction data
RealPage is using isn't always private; sometimes such data is
disclosed, the company said, such as when publicly traded real estate
firms make reports.
The FTC, which has broad authority to bring enforcement cases against businesses for anti-competitive practices, said in 2021 that it was
seeking a more active role in such cases.
A spokesperson for the FTC declined to comment on RealPage's pricing
software.
The agency has tangled with RealPage before: In 2018, the company
agreed to pay $3 million to settle an FTC complaint that the company
had failed to do enough to make sure personal information used in its
tenant screening product was accurate. RealPage did not admit
wrongdoing in the settlement.
# Higher Rents Are Burdening More Tenants
Drama over rising rent costs--now a key driver of inflation--has been increasingly public. The year before the pandemic, roughly 46% of
renters in the U.S. spent more than 30% of their income on rent and
therefore met the definition of cost-burdened, Harvard University's
Joint Center for Housing Studies found.
In mid-September in Washington, D.C., angry protesters disrupted the
normally sedate yearly conference held by the National Multifamily
Housing Council. Before security ejected them, they seized the stage
and recounted how their families had been harmed by an inability to
find safe, affordable housing.
At the center of the acrimonious debate has been RealPage's Jay
Parsons.
Since RealPage's own July conference, he's repeated a statistic,
compiled from a company data set of new lease transactions, that
market-rate apartment renters are only spending around 23% of their
income on rent.
"The reality is that rents can only rise as incomes rise," Parsons
told The New York Times last month. "If people can't afford it, you
can't lease it."
But his sunny view has drawn sharp rebukes.
D.C. Attorney General Opens Investigation Into Republican Governors'
Shipping of Immigrants to the Capital
"This is demonstrably false," wrote Ben Teresa, co-director of the
RVA Eviction Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University, on Twitter.
"One of the defining characteristics of housing markets in the last
40 years has been rents increasing faster than wages.
"The problem is quite precisely that people are paying rents they
can't afford," he wrote.
From:
https://propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent
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