[mox1]

So my partner is in hr for a large firm. There was 3 day event last year where a bunch of her and peer companies got together with a middle person to “level set” and share aggregate salary data.

The entire point of the event was to ensure incoming data to the salary aggregation company was sound.

They wait 2-4 months for a report / dstabase and they can now lookup industry salary by level and function. Its super accurate because they all go together beforehand to ensure that!

Id be shocked if the same thing wasnt happening here. No need to collude / conspire on actual offers when you already have super accurate aggregate pricing information, you already know what your competitors are going to be asking for like properties, price a little up or down.

[twoodfin]

This kind of “price discovery” (for labor in this case) is perfectly legal. Plenty of markets have “liquid” pricing and don’t need vendors to provide discovery, yet corresponding cartels don’t emerge on this fact alone.

What made a difference in cases like the Silicon Valley anti-poaching regime was direct anti-competitive action: Hiring away Apple Engineer A would be good for me, but I won’t because I’ll get an angry phone call from Steve Jobs and face potential retribution.

The crux of a case like this is whether RealPage was merely facilitating market-making price discovery (good all on its own for maximizing landlord profits—legally!) or was explicitly or implicitly creating incentives for landlords to act against their individual interest in favor of the collective interest.