The pattern this counters
Fairletis built against one specific worry: rent that is set less by a landlord reading their own local market, and more by pricing software that reads everyone's market at once. When lots of landlords price from the same shared engine, fed with the same non-public data, rents can drift up together in a way that looks like a market but behaves like coordination.
How the pattern works
- Shared software, shared data. Landlords feed occupancy and rent data into a common pricing tool. In return it tells them what to charge. The more landlords who use it, the more of the market it can see.
- Recommendations, not a spreadsheet. Instead of each landlord guessing the going rate, the tool hands them a number. When many follow the same number, individual pricing starts to move in step.
- The tenant sees a price, not the process. You are quoted a rent. You are not shown that it came from a shared engine, what data trained it, or how many nearby landlords use the same one.
- Up is stickier than down. Software tuned to protect revenue tends to nudge prices up and hold them there, even when a local landlord acting alone might have cut to fill a void.
What a regulator alleges
This is not a fringe theory. In August 2024, the US Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, a company that sells rental-pricing software to landlords [EVIDENCE-LOCK: joined by several US states; confirm the exact plaintiffs, court and filing date]. The suit alleges that RealPage's software let competing landlords set rents using each other's private, non-public information, and that this softened the competition that would otherwise hold prices down. RealPage has denied wrongdoing, and the case concerns its conduct, not any claim about a particular tenant's rent.
The case is American, and it is an allegation being tested in court, not a settled verdict. But it named the pattern out loud: pricing that comes from a shared algorithm, fed with data no single renter can see, is a different animal from a landlord pricing their own flat.
Why plain figures are the antidote
Fairlet does not fight an opaque pricing engine with a cleverer one. It fights it with the plainest possible thing: the official market rents for your area, published by the government, shown to you directly. Where does the middle half of local rents sit? Where does yours land against the median? That is the whole tool, and it is meant to stay that simple.
Landlords have always priced with market data. Fairlet points the same kind of data the other way, so a tenant can see the going rate too, and walk into a renewal or a viewing knowing roughly where a fair number sits.
This is one of the antidotes in the book Grift, Inc., which is about the slow slide of products and platforms from useful to extractive. You can read about the book at griftinc.com.