[tkahnoski]

Definitely think housing is more easily manipulated since there's little standardization of the condition of a house or the materials or features that would drive pricing. (sq foot, # bedrooms/bathrooms/pool/garage size, year built). Everything else is neighborhood comparative sales.

The auto world works a little different since there is an entire wholesale operation behind the scenes that also drives pricing. There are several alternatives to KBB although less targeted to consumers. Also way more standardized in condition reporting.... but I know too much about the industry.

[fasthands9]

I'm not so certain. There are only like a dozen car makers. In any meaningful city in America there are going to be several hundred, if not thousand, landlords. It seems hard to manipulate in that sense. Despite conspiracy theories - landlords are highly incentivized not to let apartments sit empty without rent coming in.

I do think that the introduction of software has probably made price discovery more efficient and gives landlords more confidence that if they raise rents, they will easily have offers even if the current tenants leave.

[kube-system]

Yes, the are thousands of what technically qualifies as a 'landlord' in every city, but the distribution of landlords by property type skews strongly. Units with >10 units are owned by a relatively few number of large landlords with many properties. Properties with 1 or 2 units are often owned by individuals with one or maybe a couple properties. So depending on the neighborhood, properties there might be owned by lots of different small-time landlords or it might be just a couple of large corporate landlords.

For some of the more desirable and built-up urban neighborhoods, small individually owned properties are all but bought up and almost all of the units are in large complexes owned by large corporate landlords.

[tkahnoski]

I see what you are saying. My comment was more geared towards how a Zillow number or KBB number could move the market and I didn't consider that in the context of the article about rent.

It would be interesting to see if how rent markets change if more data becomes available. In the auto-industry, a car dealer can offload the unit to the wholesale market to minimize loss, whereas a landlord is less liquid.

The inventory pressure is there in both situations. An unsold car after 30-60 days is a problem both because of typical retail business dynamics and additional factors with general vehicle depreciation and high maintenance overhead of a vehicle compared to other capital goods, but the exit strategy is there and risk exposure can be limited.