>I'm not messaging all the other sellers and suggesting we all raise prices by 10%,

The way competitors legally message each other to suggest a price increase is via the prices themselves.

E.g. an airline wants to raise the price of a ticket from New York to Los Angeles from $500 to $530 -- and they secretly want the other airlines to follow them and raise their prices too.

1) The airline submits the price increase to the global travel reservation system that all airlines can see. All the other airlines have computers constantly monitoring all the other airlines' ticket prices and can instantly adjust prices in response.

2) The airline that wants the price increase waits to see how the other airlines respond. Either (1) the competitor airlines keeps their lower prices to "take market share" -- or -- (2) they also raise their prices to match which "maintains status quo of market share" but all competitors get to take advantage of charging the higher price

3) If the other airlines don't match the higher price, the airline that "proposed" the higher price then rolls it back to $500. All this can happen within a few hours.

That's the way competitors "collude" to raise prices out in the open. The publicly visible prices are the messaging system. The loophole here is that the changing prices must be visible because the potential passengers buying the tickets need to see them too.

The above scenario has been studied by various papers and the government. The prices simultaneously act as both a "cost to buy" and as a "message to cooperate".

Legal "collusion" via price signals is easier in concentrated industries with few competitors (e.g. airlines). It's harder for fragmented markets or markets with hundreds-to-thousands of competitors. E.g. a barbershop wanting to raise the price of haircuts by $5 isn't going to get the hundred other barbershops to also raise their prices by $5.

It’s a complete suite for property management companies that enables an org to manage and report on vast portfolios of thousands of units. Provides functions to local property managers such as contracts and evictions, rent collection, and purchase order management for vendors. Regionally it provides metrics and pricing controls. Other competitors like Yardi exist and provide similar toolkits, but RP is gigantic enough to get the bulk of attention.

... isn't that what Realpage does?

>The difference is that’s an open market. When rents change off market, going up at the end of the year for example, that information isn’t available to market participants.

1. How is this any different than other sorts of transactions that occur on a recurring basis? For instance dog walking services or personal trainers? Such vendors are also presumably pricing their services based on what everyone else's pricing is, but any subsequent price changes aren't public.

2. Under current competition law, whether something is an "open market" is irrelevant to whether a given pricing strategy is illegal or not. Collusion doesn't magically become legal because it's done on the open market.

Please don't engage in bad faith.

If the supply of something you need doubles, but your buying power halves, you are not necessarily better off. This is a straightforward argument.

I didn't say "impossible", I said "more difficult".

Yeah, stuff like that makes sense to me! Thanks!

Sure: just google ["price fixing" "jury instructions"] (this is a cheat code for a lot of legal arguments on HN). You'll get a lot of them!

My source was this article which broke the RealPage story three years ago:

https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...

> For tenants, the system upends the practice of negotiating with apartment building staff. RealPage discourages bargaining with renters and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money.

...

> Apartment managers can reject the software’s suggestions, but as many as 90% are adopted, according to former RealPage employees.