I had planned to move from Virginia back to Colorado in 2018 or 2019, but some things went a little squirrelly, and I got put back about a year and a half, and then COVID fucked everything up, and then in 2022, the market for real estate (and for rentals) went totally fucking nuts, and it took me another year to sort thru it enough to get a place at a semi-reasonable price.
Anyway, what I don't know about economics could fill volumes, but I do know that when a market overheats, it tends to get tangled up in "irrational exuberance" (thank you, Mr Greenspan), and you have to expect a snap-back effect - aka: "market correction", which can be anything from a Dip-In-Market-Valuation to boing, as the whole thing craters in on itself.
It seems we are entering a period of correction. Keep your fingers crossed.
The pandemic years of overpaying for homes are over, according to a Denver realtor group’s analysis
Home sellers should also be ready to make more concessions to potential buyers.
As COVID-19 sent waves of uncertainty rippling through the housing market, sellers would list their homes and soon after have multiple offers from buyers — both individuals and investors — who had never even seen the place and would pledge well over the asking price.
Those days are long gone, and it’s time sellers admit it.
That’s according to the latest Denver Metro Association of Realtors Market Trends report that looks at October sales in Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Clear Creek, Denver, Douglas, Elbert, Gilpin, Jefferson and Park counties.
“Ultimately, sellers need to get the pandemic years out of their minds,” wrote Libby Levinson-Katz, head of DMAR’s Market Trends Committee, in a statement.
The low-interest rates of the COVID-emergency era are over, with mortgage rates now reaching around 8%.
As a result of that and more workers returning to work, demand has dropped.
“Sellers need to focus on value and put themselves in the buyer’s shoes,” Levinson-Katz said. “Buyers are no longer willing to overpay and, as such, pricing is the number one key in this market to sell a home.”
DMAR recommends sellers make concessions and even obtain pre-inspection reports on their homes and make any needed fixes ahead of putting a home on the market.
The rub for buyers is the rise in mortgage interest rates
High mortgage rates are putting many buyers off, even with market conditions seemingly in favor of people looking for a new home.
Some buyers have turned to hard-money loans and gifts from friends and family to make homeownership possible, according to DMAR.
“Many buyers tend to hibernate for the winter, but for those who continue to look through the holiday season, there is less competition and sellers are usually more motivated to sell before the end of the year,” DMAR noted.
The sharp rise in home costs the area saw over the past few years has evened out
At the end of October, the median sales price of a home was $585,000, the same as it was in September.
But month to month, the number of closed homes plummeted by more than 11%. Over the past year that drop is nearly 16%.
Properties are now listed for a median of 16 days, and there are currently two-and-a-half months of inventory on the market.
While interest rates are turning people off from buying at the moment, Levinson-Katz wants them to reconsider that: “The key is to get onto the escalator of homeownership and experience appreciation as it moves upwards over time.”
Would now be a good time to talk about collusion and price-fixing?
Colorado renters could be part of price-fixing lawsuit
DENVER (KDVR) — Tens of thousands of Coloradans live in apartment complexes whose management companies are accused of algorithmic price-fixing that inflated rental prices across the nation.
A group of apartment renters brought a class-action lawsuit against some of the nation’s largest landlords on Oct. 19, including:
- Greystar Real Estate Partners
- Lincoln Property Co.
- FPI Management
- Mid-America Apartment Communities
- Avenue5 Residential, LLC
- Equity Residential
- Essex Property Trust
- Thrive Communities Management
- Security Properties
Companies accused of inflating rent prices
The lawsuit includes real estate analytics software firm RealPage as a defendant. A ProPublica investigation preceding the lawsuit found high concentrations of RealPage-using landlords in cities where rents have risen dramatically in the past few years.
Denver suburb rent rising even faster than city core
It alleges that each of the management companies illegally shared RealPage’s algorithm-born pricing with each other in order to inflate rental prices, rather than competing with each other on rent prices to attract renters.
Property managers vigorously disputed the charges in comments to ProPublica.
Apartment landlords in Colorado named in lawsuit
Six of the landlords named in the lawsuit have properties in Colorado:
- Greystar Real Estate Partners
- Lincoln Property Co.
- FPI Management
- Mid-America Apartment Communities
- Avenue5 Residential and Equity Residential
The landlords managed at least 200 upscale apartment complexes in the Denver metro from Castle Rock to Boulder, with the majority in Adams, Arapahoe, Denver and Jefferson counties. Most have dozens or hundreds of units.
Colorado man convicted in ‘We Build the Wall’ fraud trial
About half are owned by Greystar. Equity Residential operates 32 and Avenue5 Residential 24.
Prices range widely across properties by location and apartment size. The average low end of the price is $1,609. The average highest price is $5,327.
The lawsuit hits home in an era where broader consumer inflation is colliding with unprecedented spikes in both home sales prices and rental prices, particularly in Colorado.
It's attracting some attention at the national level as well.
Tenants Are Suing Landlords for Allegedly Price-Fixing Rents with Software and the Feds Could Get Involved
The DOJ has requested to participate in a lawsuit by tenants alleging that landlords colluded using RealPage software to artificially inflate rents.
A pair of lawsuits from tenants across the U.S. allege that landlords use rent-setting software to illegally collude and boost their rents.
One lawsuit was filed in a district court in Tennessee and one in Washington. Both lawsuits were filed a year ago after a ProPublica investigation revealed that real estate software and analytics company RealPage’s rent-setting software, formerly called YieldStar, was artificially raising rents by sharing market data from competitors and setting prices for them, as well as sometimes encouraging landlords to leave units vacant.
Over 20 lawsuits from renters across the country alleging RealPage committed antitrust violations were consolidated in April in Tennesse’s Middle District, chosen for its central location. The United States Department of Justice filed a notice on October 17 asking for permission to participate in oral arguments on December 11. The court approved the government’s request, and the DOJ has until November 15 to submit a formal statement of intent if it wants to participate.
The RealPage class action complaint alleges that a “cartel” of landlords “artificially inflated prices in the multifamily real estate market in the United States” using RealPage's software. Now called RealPage Revenue Management Software, the program relies on market data it collects as well as rental data inputted by landlords. While landlords should theoretically be competitors, in practice they would “work with a community,” as one landlord is quoted as saying in the complaint. The complaint alleges that RealPage requires its users to accept at least 80 percent of its rent recommendations, and that users actually accept about 90 percent, giving RealPage market influence equal to its clients’ combined units.
But the most controversial practice alleged in the complaint—and laid out in the ProPublica report—is that YieldStar encouraged landlords to leave a certain amount of units vacant so that all the property managers using the service could artificially inflate rents. The goal was allegedly that “collectively in the market, there is never an oversupply of available units, artificially maintaining and inflating prices,” the complaint says. RealPage also coached its landlords that this practice would allow them to sacrifice “physical occupancy” for “economic occupancy.”
The main plaintiff in the lawsuit, Andrea Crook, rented from Mid-America Apartment Communities, Inc., a publicly traded real estate investment trust based in Memphis that is named as a defendant in the suit along with RealPage. Other large corporate landlords are named as defendants in the complaint, including Greystar and Cushman & Wakefield.
Are you a tenant at a property owned by one of the companies named in the RealPage or Yardi lawsuits? Has your rent increased? Motherboard wants to hear from you. Email roshan.abraham@vice.com or reach him on Signal at 646-657-8247.
When reached for comment, a RealPage spokesperson said that the company wouldn't comment on pending litigation and instead directed Motherboard to a "white paper" on revenue management written by a third-party consultant.
Another lawsuit in Washington makes similar allegations about a California-based company called Yardi Systems. The company was founded in 1984, when it provided property management software for the Apple II computer.
That class action alleges that from September 2019 to the present, Yardi and a group of multifamily apartment managers colluded to set prices through a centralized price-fixing software it launched in 2011 called “RENTMaximizer.” (The software has since been rebranded as RevenueIQ.) The lawsuit says the pricing was “supracompetitive,” or above what the market would have otherwise determined.
“In the absence of knowledge about competitors’ pricing strategies, property managers can only make their best educated guesses and set their prices at optimal positions, usually a bit lower than what offered by competitors—to attract renters in the market,” the lawsuit argues.
But the company “unlawfully solved this problem” with RENTMaximizer, the lawsuit argues, which “effectively outsources the management of rental pricing from a landlord to Yardi itself, which then implements higher prices collectively across a group of landlords.”
The lawsuit quotes Terri Dowen, Yardi’s VP of sales, as saying RENTMaximizer “simplifies the process by eliminating rent rate guesswork.” The complainants believe this proves that the software was “marketed as a means to eliminate the discounting that would occur in a competitive market.”
The complaint quotes Yardi marketing materials that say landlords who use the service “beat the market by a minimum of 2%” and “gain on average more than 6% net rental income.” Other marketing material for the product said users could “consistently beat the market.”
While the property managers who worked with Yardi are also accused of collusion in the complaint, this doesn’t always mean they directly communicated. (Although the complaint alleges they did that too.) Like RealPage's program, the software relies on data from landlords, who input rents in units they own, then get to see comparative rents in their area. Yardi then provides the landlord a recommendation for the units they own.
Landlords boasted about the higher rents they charged with the software in Yardi’s marketing. Brantley White, president of Ardmore Residential, was quoted in a 2016 Yardi press release saying, “RENTmaximizer has allowed us to push rents more aggressively and takes more human error out of the process.”
According to the complaint, other witnesses who worked at property management companies confidentially gave plaintiff attorneys testimony. A leasing consultant at Bridge Property Management is quoted as saying, “It was ridiculous. We were supposed to be helping these people who couldn’t afford a home. Instead, we were raising rents.”
The complaint says that many of the property managers being sued directly communicated with each other, as well, and a confidential witness said that one company would “call their competitors, often on a weekly basis, and specifically ask what prices those competitors were charging.”
Yardi did not respond to Motherboard's request for comment sent to available channels; the company appears to only have a media contact for its Matrix research service.
While there’s no data on how many households have rents set by Yardi’s software, an executive at the company claimed Yardi was used for 8 million residential units across the world. The attorneys also ran an analysis of 23,000 households using Yardi to see if rents were higher and found they were 6 percent higher among units where landlords used the software, in line with the company’s marketing claims.
