Is it collusion to go to a rental search site and survey the asking rents, then asking similar for your property, knowing that your competitors are (probably) doing the same?
Is it collusion when a gas station manager drives around the neighborhood, looks at the competitors posted price for gas, and sets his prices the same?
Neither of those examples are what I described and are perfectly fine.
You have to use a third party that is setting a price and stick to that, knowing others are doing the same. You're describing individuals determining their own price using their own judgement.
I think the argument in this case is the algorithm is effectively acting as a single agent that will always come to a fixed price and is actively recommending having vacancies to prevent competition.
Where as if individuals are assessing the prices they are in a sort of prisoners dilemma, if they leave a property vacant someone may lower the average price meaning they can't recoup the lost earnings when it is occupied. So their best bet is to keep a property occupied as much as possible.
Eh, I'm really not convinced they'd be effective. If they're trying, then sure whack them with price fixing charges.
I'm just not aware of any markets where these guys are dominant. You STILL have the prisoners dilemma issue, as there are tons of smaller landlords out there that definitely aren't playing in this game no matter what you're doing.
And I don't see how this is THAT much different from just doing a search for rental properties in your area on zillow and setting your rent prices accordingly. If THAT is price fixing, then how does anyone expect a market to work at all?
IANAL but it probably would it you did it whatever the circumstances.
If you were the cheapest gas station in the neighborhood with prices appropriate to your operation but one day decide to align your price to your competitors and keep adjusting your price to whatever they set while nothing changed for you, that feels like the very definition of price fixing.
Who isn't going to set their prices relative to their competitors in a market? And also try to have as low a cost as possible, so they have as good a profit margin as possible? It's basic business 101.
If THAT is price fixing, then literally every business ever in the history of business has done price fixing.
That also isn't colluding with anyone, near as I can tell. Maybe if you did a wink-wink-nod-nod to each other while driving by? Typically when I've heard of price fixing, there was some explicit cartel or industry assoc or meeting between folks or whatever where they could actually agree to something, punish 'non compliance', etc.
This feels like the Google Antitrust case, where no one can even seem to say what they would have reasonably expected Google to do instead that would make any sense, and the issue is more that there are as-yet-unresolved structural components that no one is able to articulate a rule that would prevent whatever problem everyone is getting worked up about.
> Who isn't going to set their prices relative to their competitors in a market? And also try to have as low a cost as possible, so they have as good a profit margin as possible? It's basic business 101.
The text book behavior would be to price yourself lower than the competitors and try to get market share from them.
In our current paradigm, if you have low costs while keeping your price as high as the incumbent, there should be other players entering the market and disrupting it by going for lower margins. That mechanism not happening even as there's a variety of actors in the market is where it's qualified as "price fixing" IMHO.
PS: about Google's antitrust case, are you refering to them stopping other stores from getting installed on android phones ?
Not really - in a rental market, you can't get 'more market share' due to pricing, once your units are rented out 100%. 'market share' in a highly inelastic market like housing is only achievable by long term capital intensive purchasing, building, or upgrading of units.
In this kind of business, in the short-medium term (aka when setting rents), they're usually looking to reduce vacancy rates (aka achieve the highest utilization of their assets), so they'd set their rents to be relative to the market (same, lower, higher) as necessary to achieve their target vacancy rate. Notably, the market itself usually has highly variable seasonal demand and relatively low volume, so it can take months to figure out if you're high/low/just right unless you're managing a LOT of units.
For landlords, vacancies can practically never be zero for very long without problems, for similar reasons why unemployment at zero for very long creates problems - there needs to be some downtime to do things like unit maintenance and upgrades, adjust timing to have availability during peak times for good tenants, etc.
Zero would be ideal from a ROI perspective though.
Attempting to corner the market - in all but the smallest markets - can be VERY expensive and high risk, due to high capital and cashflow costs for housing stock, high workforce
(and household) mobility in the US, and a very diverse set of competitors.
After all, anyone who actually owns housing in the area is a potential competitor if rents get too high, let alone all the small/medium landlords which don't have nearly enough cushion to attempt that kind of maneuver without going almost immediately bankrupt.
So even if all the big corp apartment complexes or whatever were in on it (and the big property management companies too), all the smaller/medium landlords would be unable to even attempt to participate and folks would end up moving to subletting SFH pretty quick.
"in any way" is doing a lot of work there though. The way they're using a 3rd party algorithm is effectively communication and the FTC isn't standing for it.
