Balcony with single mattress listed for nearly $1K a month as housing prices soar t.co/dp46wpVJU7 pic.twitter.com/wheMnAONts
— New York Post (@nypost) July 5, 2024
A Sydney landlord has advertised an enclosed balcony for rent at $969 a month, as the dire state of Australia’s housing market is laid bare.
The Facebook Marketplace listing describes the balcony in Haymarket in Sydney’s inner suburbs as a “sunny room” that is fit to accommodate one person.
Images show the room decked out with a single bed, a mirror, blinds and a rug over what is likely tiled flooring.
Glass sliding doors connecting the balcony to the rest of the property are shown in the advert and the reflection in a full-length mirror shows an adjacent wall is also glass.
The landlord said the room was ready for a perspective tenant to “move in now”, with the weekly rent “including bills”.
Landlords are using a popular software tool to jack up your rent
RealPage may not be a household name, but if you live in a major US city, you’ve probably walked past (or lived in) an apartment that had its rent price set by the software. Its clients, as of 2020, the last year data was publicly available, included the 10 largest multifamily property-management companies in the US. Its suite of services is used to manage more than 24 million units worldwide, according to the company’s website.
Landlords have a lot of built-in leverage over renters. Moving is a pain, so tenants are more likely to accept rent hikes. Developing new apartments is expensive and time-consuming, which makes it tough for competitors to enter the market. Even during shaky periods for the economy, rents tend to hold steady or even climb — people still need to live somewhere.
Over the past few years, the playing field tilted further in favor of landlords. Rents soared thanks to a shortage of apartment units , remote workers’ desire for more space , and a daunting for-sale market that kept many renters stuck in place.
Big-time apartment owners, it turns out, also had a secret weapon: a Texas company called RealPage, which sells software to property managers to help them set rents and juice their profits. Its algorithm tells landlords exactly how much rent they should charge for units in their buildings, based on a potent mix of both public and nonpublic data that property owners supply to the company.
RealPage openly brags about its ability to help clients “outpace the market in good times and bad.” In a new lawsuit against the company, Kris Mayes, Arizona’s attorney general, offered a translation: “‘Outpace’ is code for charging higher prices than what would be charged in a market untainted by collusion,” the complaint reads. “This is price fixing, and it is illegal.”
The lawsuit is one of dozens that accuse RealPage of operating a vast conspiracy to overcharge renters via its prized algorithm. Critics say the cooperation between RealPage and apartment managers has emboldened landlords to raise prices even if it means more units are left empty when tenants are forced to leave. Without RealPage, the plaintiffs argue, landlords would be hesitant to jack up rents; instead, they’d focus on keeping their buildings full.
h/t Phennommennonn