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Up to a Quarter of Rental Inflation Is Due to Price-Fixing

From 2020-2024, rent prices spiked by a third. How much of that is due to collusion by corporate landlords and a software coordinator? And where is the Fed?

Late last month, the Department of Justice filed a complaint against a software and consulting firm called RealPage, alleging a broad conspiracy among corporate landlords to increase rents to millions nationwide. Higher rent prices, in other words, are not just a problem for families trying to get shelter, but are actually impacting macro-economic policies for the entire economy, shifting the cost of financing every city, factory, airplane, credit card, et al. And academic economists, who are usually part of the Fed-world in one way or another, tend to avoid research in this area or are extremely leery of going where there isn’t sufficient data, because challenging orthodoxies on pricing power is offensive to the profession.

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