[anomaloustho]

I worked on a direct competitor to YieldStar and we had very high parity to YieldStar before we were acquired by Realpage. At least, the discussions at my smaller company pre-acquisition about negotiating price was that one unfortunate mis-negotiation could result in a Fair Housing incident (legitimate or not)

For example - Tenant 1 of racial profile X walks through the door and is a good negotiator. Tenant 2 of racial profile Y walks through the door and doesn’t negotiate. Tenant 2 finds out about Tenant 1 and opens a discrimination case under FHA.

At least the culture at my smaller company was to do everything to steer the rental property away from potential Fair Housing incidents. However, we did learn while working on the competing YieldStar product that the simple act of removing the negotiations caused a big knock-on effect of creating a revenue increase. That kind of put a bad taste in our mouths, because we didn’t like the fact that it wasn’t the software that was causing the increase so much as the pre-requisite of stopping negotiations. We started experimenting with how to improve the algorithm even more and if it could create bigger gains that drove more product value than simply the “don’t negotiate” effect. But we were then acquired by Realpage.

There are other ways these algorithms discriminate indirectly. For example, these algorithms tend to dial up prices around holidays like Christmas. And they do that because anyone who wants to sign a lease around the holidays has a much higher percentage chance of having some sort of life turmoil. (like maybe a family fight broke out or abuse happened on Christmas that caused someone to move out) From a business standpoint, the rental property would argue, “Someone in a bad way has a statistically more significant chance of also causing undo cost increases or breaking leases early.” — so the algorithm cranks up the prices to make up for potential costs.

Dialed up at the level and scope of industry control that Realpage has gained over the years, then you encounter all kinds of other issues.

The other perspective that these products take is they look at the short term rental industry like hotels and AirBnB. The business approaches by wondering, “Why can’t long term rentals be as technologically sophisticated as the short term rental industry. Let’s create a product that brings long term rentals automation into this decade” and the issue you run into is that short term rentals have 30x-100x the data points that you have. So it creates a gravity towards reaching into as many data points as you possibly can in order to make the product half as compelling, which includes reaching into your own internal data.

[wholinator2]

How did you feel about all of that personally? What was the culture inside a company like that?

From the outside, i couldn't possibly imagine any person who's ever had trouble making rent playing along while their company was unnecessarily inflicting that pain on large numbers of other people. Yes, when a company is running things they'll do what they can to avoid lawsuits, even if that is "become a soulless algorithmic profit extractor". But businesses are made of people. Was there anyone in the company that had a problem with it?

[anomaloustho]

The loudest part of the company that inflicted pain on people revolved around the background checks. We had a call center dedicated to taking those calls, e.g. “You have a DUI and your landlord doesn’t allow” / “You committed a felony and your landlord says they don’t allow felonies.” - everyone was encouraged to sit on those calls to know what it felt like and have empathy.

Most products centered on whether you actually got a lease or not in the first place (and it was mainly crime related). Once you got into a lease and were struggling to pay rent, anything else would have moved to a manual action taken by the landlord if they wanted to be a soulless jerk. (Not sure about whether Realpage has some kind of automated product for that but we didn’t)

As for competing YieldStar product. Our main objection was that if we were to build price projection software, it’d better reflect the actual market. The algorithm and heuristics like “raise rent on Christmas” didn’t sit well, so we raised the conversation and stalled the project for a few weeks. Eventually we were told we’d get to revisit our concerns in the V2 but we’d be overruled for the time being “just to get out this MVP”.

[margalabargala]

People who write software tend to be underrepresented in the group of people who have had trouble making rent as a working adult. And it's not hard to fill out sales, HR, etc with similar people.