Yeah, its 45 without traffic, 1h-1:10 on a normal day, 1.5h during the morning and evening commutes. So they're solidly outside the city radius.
The thing is, before I moved in, I did research on 1bdroom apartments within a large radius of the city.
And basically, unless I was willing to move to a very unsafe area or very unsafe or clearly problematic apartment, rents simply do not go beneath my current rent price.
There seems to be an agreed upon price floor from all landlords, and the only thing that changes as you get further from the city center is the size and quality of the apartment.
But that means literally every apartment in about an hour circle of my location is more than my parent's mortgage. At least the roaches and I don't have major commuting costs as well.
> Specifically, every morning, RealPage provides participating Lessors with recommended price levels. ... If Lessors wish to diverge from the “approved pricing” they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval. ... But RealPage emphasizes the need for discipline among participating Lessors and urges them that for its coordinated algorithmic pricing to be the most successful in increasing rents, participating Lessors must adopt RealPage’s pricing at least 80% of the time.
> In one neighborhood in Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of apartments were overseen by just 10 property managers, every single one of which used pricing software sold by RealPage.
I would politely recommend reading the article, if you would like to comment on it.
> As former FTC chairwoman Maureen K. Ohlhausen put it, as quoted in ProPublica:
"Is it OK for a guy named Bob to collect confidential price strategy information from all the participants in a market and then tell everybody how they should price?' [Ohlhausen] said. 'If it isn’t OK for a guy named Bob to do it, then it probably isn’t OK for an algorithm to do it either."
A quick sanity check of that statement using Google pulls this from the FTC's website:
> Price fixing is an agreement (written, verbal, or inferred from conduct) among competitors to raise, lower, maintain, or stabilize prices or price levels.
Collusion doesn't stop being collusion just because one introduces a middleman.
As best I understand, for some charges you only have to think out loud about something hard enough to get charged for a lesser charge of Conspiracy.
If you do a thing and I planned it, we could get charged with a whole host of things. If I send you to buy a gun to commit the crime and oops that was an undercover cop, then a few warrants later we could be in a lot of trouble just for intent and opportunity.
The thing is, before I moved in, I did research on 1bdroom apartments within a large radius of the city.
And basically, unless I was willing to move to a very unsafe area or very unsafe or clearly problematic apartment, rents simply do not go beneath my current rent price.
There seems to be an agreed upon price floor from all landlords, and the only thing that changes as you get further from the city center is the size and quality of the apartment.
But that means literally every apartment in about an hour circle of my location is more than my parent's mortgage. At least the roaches and I don't have major commuting costs as well.