Most landlords arent big corporate in the USA either especially in areas where the housing crisis is the worst.

I think this narrative is just meant to distract people from questioning the necessity of the landlord class, they want people angry at a faceless corporate boogieman instead of local landlords (for obvious reasons)

By what mechanism do the producers keep prices high if the "lots of competition" is constantly undercutting them and adding new supply to replace anything the colluding subset tries to withhold from the market?

The prices should be delayed two months. The rate at which pricing information propagates dictates how much of the rental pricing mass (number of owners * average units owned) gets thrown around how quickly. I don't have a number, but something like 2 months. Treat this data as if it was a vile of Devil's venom [1]. If they setup back channel information sharing networks, or collusion networks of any kind. <bad thing happens, not just a fee>

Second, the historical database should be deleted. And if they can't survive that, so be it. Keeping the spoils of crime should be the crime. Justice still isn't finished.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_venom

Can you share several articles about this? I haven't found one but it's hard to search for.

The general premise of the rental market is that if rents are high, the profits from building new rental units will justify the construction costs and then new units will be added until the rents go down, i.e. until it stops being profitable to add more.

This actually works unless you inhibit the construction of new units. Naturally that's what we've been doing, which is why it isn't working. But the solution is to stop inhibiting the construction of new units.

Because the alternatives don't actually work. Unless you can build enough units to meet demand, there aren't enough units. Which means you either have high prices which suppress demand because people who can't afford them are forced out, or shortages because you're imposing some inadvisable price controls and then instead of being unable to get a unit because you can't afford the rent, you can't get a unit because they're all occupied and no one is adding more.

Well the point of market based interventions and government regulations like this is primarily to reduce information asymmetry. You still ultimately need to increase supply or reduce demand to move price.

Depends on the rate of information update and how long the records are retained for. High frequency updates create a higher fidelity information channel.

Berlin wants to do that to enforce rent control more effectively.

Americans are too privacy focused to accept this, but I could easily see a cottage industry of "registered agents" popping up around it who sign leases on behalf of individuals and shield them from public scrutiny.

Alternatively we could keep the names private. A cryptographic solution would easily serve the need of authorities verifying the right person is in a place without identification, but good luck figuring out how to ensure the tenant has their keys somehow since in the US there are zero pieces of identification you can ensure every citizen has.

I think publishing your own rental contract is already legal?

(Unless the other party to the contract deliberately asks you in the contract to keep it quiet. But that's something you need to actively agree to.)

Well, a Torrens registry systems still isn't universal yet in the US.