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Gigachad | on: RealPage rent-pricing case wraps with nearly $360M to renters
How it works in Victoria, Australia is for renewing an existing lease is you must provide examples of comparable rentals in the area at or above the price you are proposing. And the tenant can dispute with their own comparable if they believe the price is wrong. New listings can be listed at any price.

There is enough turnover with new listings to find the market rate while preventing existing tenants from being screwed over by unreasonable prices.

Australia also almost entirely works off rentals owned by individuals who own 1-3 properties rather than corporate owners so no one landlord has any sway over the market.

ctmlr | parent | next
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)

59percentmore | root | parent | next
Rental prices are set at the edge, so you only need to own a fraction of the market to drive rent increases. Corporate landlords absolutely do this.
dimaggiosghost | root | parent
Services like RealPage provide information that allows the small landlord to act like corporate overlords, praise be American corporatism.
ctmlr | root | parent
How about an app that collectively bargains rents algorithmically? Call it RedPage lol.
AnthonyMouse | root | parent
That's basically a listing search page that allows you to sort by price.

What else do you expect "collective bargaining" to do in a market where every tenant has a different landlord? Your landlord isn't going to care if the tenants of 10,000 other landlords threaten to move out. They only care if you threaten to move out, and then to credibly do that what you need is to show them the unit you could move into which is asking for less.

The real problem is that you need the unit you can threaten to move into to first exist, rather than its construction being inhibited by zoning etc.

loading story #50403805
embedding-shape | parent
We have something similar in Spain, except instead of "comparable rentals in the area" there is a index (called IRAV (Índice de Referencia de los Alquileres)) maintained by the government each year, which limits how much rents can be increased. My landlord just reference that each year, it's easy for me to check if it's right, then that's it. For the areas where supply is limited ("áreas tensionadas"), as some areas like Barcelona is geographically limited to expansion, there is a total limit as well, independent of the IRAV.

Of course, if there are improvements in the rental, you can go beyond the index as the property been "improved", but it's really handy to know each year that it's limited and the exact amount. For 2026 it's locked to 2.14% for example, for everyone.