> While RealPage might command 80% of the market for this type of software, they only have 12,000 clients. There are over 5.2 million multi-family dwellings in the US.
That reveals a startling statistic that 80% of the market is controlled by only 12,000 users. That's 433 units per user on average.
> I think the better implication is that the vast majority of apartment owners don't bother paying for pricing software.
I don't think there's anything so far to indicate this or that; there's still a reasonable possibility that 80% of the market is controlled by large property management businesses.
This is easy to look up. There are approx 300,000 property managers in the US.
Assuming RealPage isn't lying about their number of active customers, they would only account for 16% of the industry. Obviously the numbers could be skewed wildly but it's still far from a monopoly.
The allegation would be that they have a monopoly over rental pricing, in which case the relevant metric is the percentage of rental pricing they control, not what percentage of landlords use RealPage.
If Kroger, Walmart, and Safeway decided to collude, they’re probably less than a percent of grocery store brands. They are like 95% of the grocery supply, though.
There's two major companies in the area that rent out apartments.
I rented from one a few years back. In my unit, there were 12 apartments (I think). IIRC, four per floor, with three floors. I believe there were 8 to 12 units surrounding a common area in our "block". Then this "block" was a part of a larger group of complexes and in the area, they had five or six of these groups.
That's around 50 - 100 units.
They also had other locations. They probably manage at least 1000 units.
The other company manages fewer, but not by much.
If RealPage gets both of them, they've effectively set the prices for all apartments in the area.
> That reveals a startling statistic that 80% of the market is controlled by only 12,000 users. That's 433 units per user on average.
This conflates the market for this type of software with the larger housing market. Presumably, this software is only used by some large (probably mostly hedge-fund or REIT funds) apartment complexes. So, yeah, 80% of that market, but that's only a tiny amount of the overall market.
The DOJ chose that number (almost certainly out of a hat, because there's no way to actually identify all of them) of 80% in order to make it seem like it's a monopoly, but proving at trial that RealPage or its clients controls prices over more than a tiny fraction of the market will be incredibly difficult (actually impossible, because it's obviously not true).
However, given the DOJ's limitless funding to pursue this, clearly it's not after actually winning at trial; it's after a consent decree.
That reveals a startling statistic that 80% of the market is controlled by only 12,000 users. That's 433 units per user on average.