We are in the midst of a nationwide housing crisis, but landlords across the country aren’t interested in filling vacancies. RealPage, the software company currently under FBI investigation, is advertised as helpful software that gives property managers recommendations on how to price rental housing. In reality, RealPage’s price-fixing cartel has raised the price of rental housing to astronomical rates, changing the logic of the rental market. When mortgage rates went up in 2022, conventional market logic would have meant that landlords would be desperate to fill as many empty apartments as possible. Instead, RealPage gave them the tools to extract ever-higher revenues out of powerless renters without having to maintain their properties or keep them in a livable state.
On today’s Weekly Roundup, David Dayen and investigations editor Maureen Tkacik discuss how RealPage has changed the rental market for the worse, as well as the Boeing hearings from earlier this week and the fintech collapse in the aftermath of Synapse’s bankruptcy.
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