[meeb]

It’s a shift in collective power. At the core of the issue is landlords communicating together to all set fixed high rents has been illegal for decades. This is collective rent fixing with an extra step. The “AI” here is just a buzzword, it’s masking a black box where many landlords pump in lots of data and a black box algorithm spits out higher rents. The issue occurs when a critical mass of landlords use the same service. The market readjusts from free market competition to the maximum the market can bear without collapsing, exactly what the anti-collusion laws were design to prevent. The economic drivers are reversed.

Like generative AI for art, it doesn’t cleanly fit into any existing governance. I would assume new, and irritating complex, laws will be attempted to be written to control this development as it has more immediate real works impact than other forms of “AI”.

[beefnugs]

The only way to turn it into a real market, is some kind of collaboration software tools for renters or non-intimate partnerships to gang up.

We need tools that arent making choices based on profit increase but humanitarian necessity (which is probably impossible)

Tools such as :

- finding people to share mortgages with, negotiating problems encountered with roomates, ways to re-shuffle roomates around to find better compatibility, incentives for being less of a dick and contributing to happier roomatism

- collective action in an area such as purchasing cheap out of town space with lots of living area and "roughing it" for a while to put downward pressure on rent prices, maybe even negotiating particular prices to trigger a large number of renter signups ( no way this is legal, but it will get bad enough we are going to have to break some rules)

- shared mortgage investment that is based upon agreed lower reasonable profit, or even money parking, instead of maximizing real estate profit (there has to be some philanthropes who would put there money into this?)

- I hate to have to mention negative landlord tracking, but the worst of the worst gets away with so much shit, we need to come up as close to vigilantism we can get while not breaking laws. I foresee the need for tools where we can track exact letter of law harassment limits etc for the worst offenders who are getting away with too much uncaught illegal and immoral landlording

[rapind]

I kind of think long term you want government to build a healthy number of basic units. This is what Canada did after WW II (vet housing). Since then they pivoted to market manipulation w/ CMHC and I don’t think it worked out. I’m only a fan of government when it comes to universal programs though. You shouldn’t have to pass any gatekeepers, units should be available to everyone (billionaires too) but as 1 per and disallowed from renting etc. (non-investment, primary residence)

Having a public option for housing could go a long way towards keeping a middle class.

[another2another]

Another way to turn it into a more competitive market is to introduce large competition in the form of not for profit housing co-ops where the coop buys to rent houses, renters have to buy into the coop, and all profits are put into either buying or building new houses.

The coops keep their rents below that of the competition to attract new members, and can even reduce the rents after the initial outlay has been payed off.

This would then create a number of large semi-altruistic competitors that would throw sand into the capitalistic machine and inhibit price gouging.

[tdb7893]

I had an argument with people the other day that it's not "free" as in unregulated markets that are good but "free" as in competitive ones. If you free a market from governmental influence but captured by private companies that don't meaningfully compete then it's also not free.

[noobermin]

There really are few people nowadays who are for truly competitive markets, other than lay people. I feel like every large so-called probusiness group or politician really is for monopolistic corporate rule of life and the market, they only gesture towards the free market ethos as an ideological commitment but not one they really truly believe in.

[crooked-v]

Exactly. As with the ongoing RealPage case, all the 'algorithm' and 'AI' stuff is just a system designed to enable price collusion without landlords directly talking to each other.

[i-am-fnord]

It's just like Uber, Airbnb, and the rest of the tech world. As it turns out most of the technology we've built doesn't really help people at all... we've given corporations new ways to collude or evade regulations causing immense harm to our society. All we've done is help companies break the law and get rich at the expense of the people. And our stupid governments won't even hold them accountable.

[testfoobar]

What if the largest landlords in a community just hired someone to canvas the city on a monthly basis and collect rental price data that way.

In most markets, comparative pricing of other vendors is always a solid baseline for where to start pricing your product. Market intelligence is a critical part of any go to market strategy.

Edit: Just to be clear, I think market collusion is anti-competitive. But where is the dividing line between market research and collusion? Clearly if landlords met in the back of a smoky bar the last sunday of every month to set rents - we'd call that collusion. But is such formal data sharing and price setting actually required to achieve the same effect - practically, landlords could just observe each other's rents to achieve a similar effect. Where should the law decide it is collusion?

[jjav]

> But where is the dividing line between market research and collusion?

Scale and ubiquity make all the difference in the world even if it seems like the same public data.

An example that comes to mind, different topic but somewhat analogous: cameras recording activity in public spaces. Some people argue there is nothing different happening today from decades ago because if you are doing activities in a public space anyone could record you just fine whether 50 years ago or today.

But they are wrong, it is vastly different. Fifty years ago someone could record you in that public space, but the odds were infinitesimally small that someone actually did. And if they did, the odds of anyone else finding that video were smaller yet. Today with ubiquitous cameras everywhere recording everything all the time it's a near certainty that you are being recorded in public spaces. And with all that video going into "the cloud" and usually available to every government agency, it's all analyzed and indexed and thus searchable at a scale never before imaginable.

Long-winded example to show that scale makes all the difference even if the underlying action is the same. Sure, some landlords have colluded with some others for centuries, but the ability for all of them to collude on every property real-time is a fundamental shift.

[anileated]

Scale makes things different.

You can hire people to scrape the Internet for artwork and then produce images in arbitrary styles (same for text), but you would need to constantly pay them wages (benefitting their lives, reducing unemployment, injecting money into the economy) and you can only do so much. If they become good enough they will just quit and live off freelance commissions.

Similarly, if you hire low-paid people to canvas the city for rent prices, and yet more people to aggregate them without any ML, chances are one of them is renting and will raise the question with the authorities, and also why not just drop off to start own real estate agency with all that data.

[BigParm]

Can workers do this with wages? We all submit our wage data and then refuse to work for less than our oracle suggests?

[tpxl]

Employers do this with wages. They pool all their wage data then refuse to pay more than their oracle suggests.