Ars Technica reports about a lawsuit filed against 14 DC landlords who are accused of having colluded “with a property management software firm to keep rent prices high in a city with a housing affordability crisis.” The software company RealPage suggests rental prices to landlords, based on the data that they feed the software company.
Sounds like a very risky data feedback loop to me anyway, but apparently these 14 landlords in DC joined forces with the company to keep rent prices artificially high on the platform. Effectively they formed a housing cartel.
Just another warning that despite rhetorics of optimization, urban technologies when unchecked frequently tend to benefit the already powerful at the expense of the less privileged (in this case by deliberate misuse).
Link to the original article on Ars Technica >>