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”.
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
Having a public option for housing could go a long way towards keeping a middle class.
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.
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?
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.
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.
If rents are paid no matter what, you dont need AI to tell you to set it high.
But we know rents arent limitless because ability to pay is not limitless.
It says it right in the article's subtitle:
>Software the U.S. government says is illegal gives landlords ability to coordinate rent hikes.
The AI (in this instance "AI" just means "a blackbox algorithm") is basically an excuse to provide plausible deniability on market collusion. Combine this with the relatively inelastic nature of the demand for housing, it creates an avenue for abuse. Without the AI, you don't have collusion meaning increased competition will produce a lower and fairer market price.
You could probably just have software without any AI that says to everyone who uses it "raise prices by 10% this month" and then everyone does it.
Maybe that's all it does anyway, who knows.
I think the real problem is that it constitutes a cartel.
You’re mischaracterizing the problem. It’s not that shelter is a basic need that can’t be fulfilled at any other apartment building. It’s that a 14-month lease with a 10k lease break penalty will readily ruin anyone’s life on the spot. Paying 50% more for month-to-month isn’t feasible for anyone either.
There are also people who can move to other locations.
If rents are up, you need more houses, it's really not that complicated.
The supply side has been imploded by government decree, leading inexorably to the current debacle. I personally know several builders closing down their businesses. Not for lack of demand, of course, but because construction has been made impossible by vacant-eyed bureaucrats.
Dear central planners and jr. totalitarians:
This self-imposed disaster won’t cease until you decide it’s time for it to be over. Or, keep voting as you have - your choice. You do you.
I see nothing wrong with this market at all. The reality is that there’s plenty of people willing to live in these apartments, often splitting the rent with roommates. The more people that do that, the more the rent goes up because now it’s acceptable to have two or even three incomes paying what used to be the rent for a one bed room.
The only way for the little guy to win this game is to not play. Screw those overpopulated metros and go live somewhere else.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/london-ontario-real-es...
The median price of a single-family home is C$685k. This is one of the cheapest cities in Ontario.
If I "go live somewhere else", that means moving to Texas where I can triple my take-home pay as a software developer for a significantly lower cost of living.
Labour is not a perfect commodity that can be moved around. Once someone leaves Canada, they're probably not going to cut their earnings by moving back, even if we fix the housing crisis.
This has already happened with AI. Go look at Geoffrey Hinton's students and researchers at the University of Toronto.
With urbanisation going up to 11 there are not many "somewhere else cheap to live" for many professions. People can't easily find a job at a place with lower rents because there's a reason it has lower rents: it's less desirable, has less opportunities, so on and so forth.
For the privileged class of office workers with remote jobs that's an easy solution, and one that I see many peers taking over time, for the rest of society it's not feasible. If you were a theater actor (or teacher), you can't go live in the middle of nowhere, you won't have many peers, you won't have many venues, companies, etc. to work with. Now apply that logic to many professions who need a community around (of other workers, of companies or customers) to do their work and you will realise that for the vast majority of people it's not feasible to flee expensive urban centres.
I am fairly certain that 15% increase was the automatic recommendation by RealPage.
RealPage would only have an affect on new leases with new apartments.
Your lease does not renew, it automatically goes month to month. They can't cancel a lease, they would need a reason to evict and apply for it at the LTB.
Of course, if your pricing assistant is trained on pricing & occupancy data across all landlords, you and other users are obviously colluding.
Apparently, though, you can successfully pretend you are not colluding. “AI told me to raise prices” and as we observe with copyright laundering so far legal system does not care what AI ingested. Inputs magically disappear into the black box of magic.
Dare not think otherwise lest Nvidia tanks.
A lot of Americans complain how shitty they got it, For Canadians it is like heaven here. You can actually buy a house in a major city and afford nice things and earn a decent salary.
This is not possible in the majority of Canadian cities. Canada is a great place to visit but it is a shitty place to work and live, unless your parents own a house and have a couple of rentals (in Vancouver or Toronto) that you're going to inherit.
Even 100k salary in Toronto is poverty these days, I don't know how people do it anymore. Private industry pays like shit and unless your a Gov Employee it's just tough.
-ExPat...never coming back.....
Can confirm 100k salary in Vancouver is nothing. Even 200k I wasn't saving money.
What makes me angry is learning 1/4 jobs in Canada is a government job. Taxes, housing, society (I don't even feel like I live in Canada sometimes).
I don't know what other options there are. It's quite bleak and living in Canada takes a toll on your mental health.
I envy you...
There most certainly is regulation, and that's why housing prices are so high. If you got rid of the regulation, builders would build new housing. It's like this all across Western nations now: they can't build new housing in the needed quantity because of zoning regulations.
It’s caused several builders I know to close their businesses.
Congratulations! Sometimes, evidently, you get what you vote for?
I've even heard people lament saying they miss Chinese international students who would spend a lot of money, creating jobs but these new Indian "students" just show up at food banks taking everything, overcrowding homes, taking advantage of government benefits, jobs meant for new graduates, nepotism, just DDOSing the whole Canadian infrastructure as a whole is the popular opinion.
I don't know what to do about it and neither do the politicians. I'm not exactly thrilled to be importing this many people from India, a country which I frankly don't have any interest or passion for.
Everyday I just long to be away from it all but tough to do that when you rely on payment from one location.
canada is better than most
DOJ sues realpage for algorithmic pricing scheme that harms renters
Question for anyone that knows: how does it end? Will some landlords go bust and get bought by 1 or 2 mega corpos, and then rinse and repeat until it's a McDonald's/Burger King monopoly? Will all rentals be owned by a single entity? Are they already owned by one? I heard all these corps are ultimately owned by Blackrock
I am just trying to see what possibly even worse crisis will spawn from this crisis. Population levels are expected to decrease over the coming decades. Will that trigger a collapse in rents? Where will "greed" move to, what novel forms of collusion and exploitation will we suffer instead of it being all focused on rent and property?
Edit: I just realised that the shift may already be happening in the form of other basic necessity industries colluding: utilities, car insurance, "public" transport, food
The article blames "AI" for raising rents, and then later says, "well actually, everyone raised rents".
You can have all the AI in the world, and even all the collusion you can manage, but competition still exists, raise rent to the point that people won't rent, you'll have an empty apartment. Lower it (i.e. ignore the collusion) and you'll fill that spot.
The law of Supply and Demand still works.
The only kind of collusion that might break that law is if landlords are forced by the agreement not to lower rent to compete.
It's really very simple: What's the vacancy rate? If it's low, prices are going up, it's as simple as that. Forget the boogeyman (AKA AI), build more houses.
The problem is on the supply side. It happens because of zoning restrictions. There actually is plenty of housing nationwide, but that isn't really usable because moving involves quite a bit of friction, as well as because of general market failures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RSwkXbjaE0
And because it's constantly talked about by activists: rent control doesn't work. It actually reduces supply (because people who would offer apartments at the top end of the market drop out of the market) and liquidity (because people who do and don't already have a lease are treated differently). This is one of the best agreed-upon results in economics.
https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/research-notes/2023/re... , among countless other links a basic search might turn up.
The complaint states:
> Across America, RealPage sells landlords commercial revenue management software. RealPage develops, markets, and sells this software to enable landlords to sidestep vigorous competition to win renters’ business. Landlords, who would otherwise be competing with each other, submit on a daily basis their competitively sensitive information to RealPage. This nonpublic, material, and granular rental data includes, among other information, a landlord’s rental prices from executed leases, lease terms, and future occupancy. RealPage collects a broad swath of such data from competing landlords, combines it, and feeds it to an algorithm.
Based on this process and algorithm, RealPage provides daily, near realtime pricing “recommendations” back to competing landlords. These recommendations are based on the sensitive information of their rivals. But these are more than just “recommendations.” Because, in its own words, a “rising tide raises all ships,” RealPage monitors compliance by landlords to its recommendations. RealPage also reviews and weighs in on landlords’ other policies, including trying to—and often succeeding in— ending renter-friendly concessions (like a free month’s rent or waived fees) to attract or retain renters. A significant number of landlords then effectively agree to outsource their pricing function to RealPage with auto acceptance or other settings such that RealPage as a middleman, and not the free market, determines the price that a renter will pay. Competing landlords choose to share their information with RealPage to “eliminate the guessing game” about what their competitors are doing and ultimately take instructions from RealPage on how to make business decisions to “optimize”—or in reality, maximize—rents.
You don't have to say anything else. That's collusion.
>The rent increase guideline for 2025 is 2.5%.
>The guideline is the maximum a landlord can increase most tenants’ rent during a year without the approval of the Landlord and Tenant Board.
>The provincial maximum on rent-controlled apartments last year was 2.5 per cent, but Sharpe’s building has no limit because Ontario Premier Doug Ford removed controls on any rental units built or occupied after November, 2018.
She also pointed out that virtually all of the grocery stores in Toronto are owned by one company.
They don’t need AI or analysis.
Canada has record immigration levels. And at the same time cities across the country decided, with the support of voters, that new residential development can not be on undeveloped lands. It must be on previously developed lands and increase density
Of course redevelopment is more expensive, takes longer, requires more consultation and planning.
The result is a severe shortage of housing.
Instead of solving this with suburban sprawl, which isn’t ideal but is necessary, politician, voters, and density ideologist choose to blame a scapegoat.
Landlords are an obvious candidate. Adding AI to the mix makes it a trendy story.
Actually maybe that future is now.
what happened to "you paid $100 last year. now from january you pay $120 or vacate?"
you have 10 apartments and they are priced at say $1000/month. whats so confidential about that?
or are you saying the AI is fed with tenant data to see which tenant is more viable to pay more rent based on income et al? like dynamic pricing? holy fuck
Its like arguing about whether to eat apples or oranges on Mars when you can't even get to Mars. Its irrelevant. The alternative is society gets a lot worse for a lot of people and tinkering with plugging legal gaps doesn't address the issue of whether we think people are entitled to a place to live if they are part of our society.
Going back in time, do you think the local village is going to let its warriors or farmers sleep outside in the cold with no shelter then expect them to work as a community for the benefit of the village elders?
Its a core issue, everything else is just busywork at this stage.
Canadian businesses were lobbying as well as pressure from Ontario Premier Ford and Mayor Olivia Chow. The Ontario and Nova Scotia provincial governments have ordered return to office minimum 3 days a week by October.
Governments in Canada are not sleeping. Quite the opposite in fact.
How do you convert an amount of money into a number of registered properties ?
I think the GP used ~6.1 trillion as that value, or maybe some number related to rental stock valuation. The <0.1% looks approximately correct.
Pick any number for average cost of a property, and its still only 0.1% of all properties.
So it’s not so much the company itself optimizing based on its own data but the argument goes, at least per the antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, that the landlords are all colluding together via an intermediary.
I think RealPage and similar systems probably add a few percentage points to rents - and if you consider how much money that is across 1000's of renters, it's worth suing them over.
But supply and demand are still the gorilla in the room.
If you see "it only inconveniences forty thousand people" and think "well yeah, it's only forty thousand, that's a small number", you don't understand numbers. Even at just over 0.01%, that's five thousand lives being controlled to the point of being held hostage by one company.
No Canadian should accept that as "this is fine and normal and fair".
