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An 'Algorithm' Turned Apartment Pools Green

RealPage, the rent-fixing software company currently under FBI investigation, also has apps for bogus fees, monetizing vacant apartments and inflating toxic property bubbles.

Management had replaced the cabinet fronts and installed stainless steel appliances and a backsplash in a few dozen of the units, and the refreshes had been “so well received that it planned to market its July renewals at 23% rental increases,” the agency’s presale report noted. Perhaps even more insidiously, when mortgage payments rose in 2022 and landlords should have, by conventional market logic, been jumping to fill empty apartments, RealPage instead gave them the tools to extract ever-higher revenues out of powerless renters, no matter how trash-strewn, roach-infested, or crime-ridden their homes had become. But that gouging came at a cost: Occupancy had plunged to 76.7 percent since the Brandon property had changed hands, meaning 229 of the complex’s apartments are currently sitting empty, an especially shocking state of affairs in a market with one of the lowest vacancy rates—around 4 percent—in the Sun Belt.

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