> The difference is the software/forums encouraged the landlords to all leave more units empty then they normally would to raise prices.
Well, in a working market, you'd have more supply get built up by developers and those landlords would lose pricing power. Or it could still fail in the other direction, people would find the area too expensive and find jobs elsewhere. I think my take here is if the landlords each had, competent, ruthless capitalist employees, they would end up setting the price just as high as RealPage, because RealPage doesn't actually have any kind of mechanism to enforce compliance with the cartel structure.