#Apartment rental software

[qoreupsmarketplace]

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[mariacallous]

If you’ve rented an apartment in the US in the past several years, you may have had the sense that the game was rigged: Prices creep up not only at your building but at others throughout the city, seemingly in lockstep. A new civil lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice today alleges that in many cases it’s not just in your head—and that a single company’s algorithm is to blame.

That company is RealPage, a Texas-based firm that provides commercial revenue management software for landlords. In other words, it helps set the prices of apartments. But it does so, the DOJ alleges in its lawsuit, by effectively helping its clients cheat; landlords feed rental rate and lease terms into the system, and the RealPage algorithm in turn spits out a suggested price that enables coordination and hinders competition.

“By feeding sensitive data into a sophisticated algorithm powered by artificial intelligence, RealPage has found a modern way to violate a century-old law through systematic coordination of rental housing prices,” deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco said in a statement.

RealPage’s reach is broad. It controls 80 percent of the market for software of its kind, which in turn is used to set prices of around 3 million units across the country, according to the DOJ. It already faces multiple lawsuits, including one from the state of Arizona and another in Washington, DC, where RealPage software is allegedly used to price more than 90 percent of units in large apartment buildings. RealPage’s algorithmic pricing first gained broader attention when a 2022 ProPublica investigation detailed how the company’s YieldStar software works.

The DOJ civil lawsuit, which was joined by the attorneys general of eight states, is a significant escalation in legal action against the company. It’s also a first for the DOJ, according to officials speaking on background during a call to discuss the complaint. While the government had previously filed criminal charges against an Amazon seller for algorithm-enabled price-fixing, this is the first civil action in which the algorithm itself, the Justice Department official says, was effectively the means of the violation.

The complaint itself quotes RealPage executives allegedly acknowledging anticompetitive aspects of its product. “There is greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially trying to compete against one another in a way that actually keeps the entire industry down,” one RealPage executive allegedly wrote.

RealPage has repeatedly denied any allegations of antitrust violations, going so far as to publish a six-page digital pamphlet that claims to tell “the Real Story” about its products, along with an extensive FAQ page on a dedicated public policy website. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “Attacks on the industry’s revenue management are based on demonstrably false information,” one section of that site reads. “RealPage revenue management software benefits both housing providers and residents.”

“We are disappointed that, after multiple years of education and cooperation on the antitrust matters concerning RealPage, the DOJ has chosen��this moment to pursue a lawsuit that seeks to scapegoat pro-competitive technology that has been used responsibly for years,” said Jennifer Bowcock, senior vice president of communications and creative at RealPage, in an emailed statement. “RealPage’s revenue management software is purposely built to be legally compliant, and we have a long history of working constructively with the DOJ to show that."

The DOJ disagrees. “Algorithms don’t exist in a law-free zone,” said Monaco in a press conference to discuss the case. “Training a machine to break the law is still breaking the law.”

In this case, the complaint alleges that those algorithms consistently drove rental prices upward. “RealPage’s software tends to maximize price increases, minimize price decreases, and maximize landlords’ pricing power,” said the DOJ in a press release. RealPage also doesn’t just recommend prices; in many cases, it actively sets them.

“RealPage actively polices landlords’ compliance with those recommendations,” said US attorney general Merrick Garland in today’s press conference. “A large number of landlords effectively agree to outsource their pricing decisions to RealPage by using an ‘auto-accept’ setting that effectively permits RealPage to determine the price a renter will pay.”

The DOJ also claims RealPage has created a “self-reinforcing feedback loop” with its data intake and pricing recommendations structure that also gives it an alleged monopoly in the apartment revenue management software industry. Any competitor who plays by the rules, the DOJ claims, is at a distinct disadvantage.

The Justice Department has spent the past several years staffing up with technologists and data scientists, better enabling them to “interrogate the code,” as multiple officials described the investigative process. While this is the first major algorithmic collusion case, DOJ officials suggested it would be far from the last.

[quasi-normalcy]

The NDP is asking the Competition Bureau to investigate whether Canadian corporate landlords are using the same AI software that sparked an antitrust lawsuit in the United States. The U.S. Justice Department filed the lawsuit last month against real estate software company RealPage Inc., accusing it of an illegal scheme that allows landlords to co-ordinate hikes in rental prices. The lawsuit was filed alongside attorneys general in multiple states, including North Carolina and California. It alleges the company is violating antitrust laws through its algorithm, which landlords use to get recommended rental prices for millions of apartments across the country.

About bloody time.

[that-one-thespian]

The Mages Were Missing

(There's still an hour left in my VERY good friend @crash-bump-bring-the-whump's birthday so I'm NOT late! This is the first of several writes in response to this incredible piece)

Izan hadn’t answered her texts. Mariano hadn’t come over after his shift like he always did. Laredo had missed a stream. Manuel didn’t come to the date that Fletcher was so excited for. Individual incidents, happening too quickly to be coincidence, made even more suspicious when Wren looked into Dimitri and realized there had been no activity on his social media. No matter how bad it was, he always posted a picture of his hideous dog in various outfits every day. 

The mages were missing. 

Tracking them down took too long. Way too long. Wren pored over security camera footage of their last known locations. The coffee shop, convenience stores, laundromats, she filtered through their cameras, finding nothing. Hours of footage. Nothing. Blind spots, erased footage, convenient glitches in the security systems. She needed a new tactic.

Police reports. Fire department logs. Dimitri was aggressive above all else, there would be an arson report, a burning building, a noise complaint, something.

After hours of searching for clues, she finally found a report. A burning hedge, near Dimitri’s apartment. 9:27 AM. Going back to her security footage, she scrubbed to that timestamp for the convenience store closest to the address. Blind spot. Someone knew she would be looking. There was only one person that clever, that surgical, and who had a bone to pick with each one of the war mages. She tried to keep tabs on him, but she could usually only narrow it down to the city he was in.

Luis was back.

Not for long, now that Wren was on the hunt. 

She scoured car rental agencies, setting her software to scan highway footage for similar cars to the ones just barely in her field of vision in the security footage, searching the previous footage for more images of the car to narrow things down. Her coffee drained from its mug. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. 

On her sixth hour of searching, she found his newest alias: Juan Herrero. John Smith, really? Beneath the anxiety and steely determination, she let herself feel a flash of derision. Finally, finally, she found the rental cabin under his name, booked at a steal because the owners were remodeling the basement. 

Wren whistled, loud enough to fill the clinic, and grabbed the car keys.

It was time to get their mages back. 

~

Wren stood at the back of the group, checking her tablet as Fletcher worked at the lock on the cabin's front door. The comms were working, but she couldn't guarantee there wouldn't be some sort of device to jam their signals.

Archer stood directly behind Fletcher, looking murderous. He always did, when Luis was involved. "Luis is crafty. We can't let him separate us. We-"

Several things happened in the same instant.

Click.

"I got it!"

Fletcher pushed open the door.

Fletcher yelped.

Fletcher was gone.

"Fletch-" Archer reached for him, but his solid metal hand closed over empty air. The team was left staring into a dark foyer, listening to the fading footsteps echoing off the walls.

Archer cursed under his breath. "It's a trap." He ran inside without another word, his expression somehow even more murderous. "Elana-"

"Here!" Elana thundered after him into the dark, leaving only Jewel and Wren on the doorstep.

"So much for don't get separated." Jewel looked hesitantly at Wren. "We should find the mages, while we know Luis is... occupied."

Wren nodded, pressing forward into the darkness.

~

Frozen hinges reluctantly yielded, screeching as Wren braced her back against the door and forced it open. She had to cover her face at the rush of cold, blinking against it.

Fluorescent lights flickered above them, dimly illuminating bleached hair and red, blistered, frost-crusted palms. 

Dimitri laid there on the floor, unmoving.

Jewel rushed into the freezer, cupping his cheek with one hand and putting two fingers at his neck with the other. “I’ve got a pulse. Help me get him up, we need to get him outside."

He wasn’t even shivering anymore. Even from the doorway, Wren could see the scorch marks on his hands. He must have been trying to keep warm using his magic alone, without any focus or gloves to protect him. 

When she grabbed his shoulder to lift him up, Wren startled. Dimitri’s eyes were open, locked on hers with the exhausted, terrified focus of someone who expected to be left behind.

“R… ru-run.”

Wren felt a chill run down her spine.

“We know it’s Luis. Archer and Elana are on him. We’re going to get you out of here, just hang on.” Jewel wrapped her jacket around Dimitri’s shoulders.

“C-care…ful.” Dimitri’s voice was hoarse, strained. Each syllable scraped past his lips like the hinges Wren had forced to move against their will. “Said… hid- hidden.”

“I can find them.” Jewel’s voice was level as she helped him to a sitting position. That was how they found Dimitri in the first place- Jewel had nearly collapsed from the force of the despair when they got close enough.

Wren slid his arm around her shoulders, flinching from the frozen clothes against her neck. It took too long to get him outside, to drape a blanket over him and give him a water bottle that he clutched to his chest. Every second was another second where Archer and Elana and Fletcher faced down Luis.

They still had four war mages to find.

[beardedmrbean]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit Friday against real estate software company RealPage Inc., accusing it of an illegal scheme that allows landlords to coordinate to hike rental prices.

The lawsuit, filed alongside attorneys general in states including North Carolina and California, alleges the company of violating antitrust laws through its algorithm that landlords use to get recommended rental prices for apartments.

The algorithm allows landlords to align their prices and avoid competition that would keep rents down, Justice Department officials said. The complaint quotes one RealPage executive as saying “there is greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially trying to compete against one another in a way that actually keeps the entire industry down.”

In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland said, “Americans should not have to pay more in rent because a company has found a new way to scheme with landlords to break the law.”

Attorneys general in several states have separately sued RealPage alleging an illegal price-fixing scheme over its algorithmic pricing software.

In a statement posted on its website in June, RealPage called claims against the company “false and misleading,” and argued its software actually “contributes to a healthier and more efficient rental housing ecosystem.” RealPage said landlords decide their own rent prices and are free to reject the recommendations provided by its software.

It’s the latest example of the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust enforcement.

The Justice Department sued Apple in March and in May announced a sweeping lawsuit against Ticketmaster and its owner, Live Nation Entertainment. Antitrust enforcers have also opened investigations into the roles Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI have played in the artificial intelligence boom.

[stlivingla]

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[mypatchworkreflection]

"As Competition Policy International (CPI) reported earlier this month, "RealPage's system, which provides rental price recommendations based on real-time data from landlords, is alleged to be a key tool in manipulating the rental market. The firm's influence covers 70% of multifamily apartment buildings."

"The scheme purportedly operated by encouraging landlords to adopt RealPage's pricing recommendations, a practice they follow 80-90% of the time," reported CPI. "This coordinated approach reduces the availability of rental units, driving up prices. One of the architects of RealPage's system reportedly stated that the aim is to prevent landlords from undervaluing their properties, ensuring consistently higher rents across the board."

Zelnick said it was "unsurprising that some of the same companies that needlessly inflated housing costs have worked closely with a software company accused of helping landlords coordinate a massive price fixing scheme. Through-the-roof rent hikes based on greed—not need—have kept many Americans from getting ahead, which is why Congress must do more to support the Biden administration's affordable housing actions.""

I only learned recently about RealPage (Thanks, American Fever Dream podcast!) but it seems ripe for hacktivism to me... Oh, and what's this?

"In April 2023, author James M. Nelson posted an article, The Harlan Crow—Clarence Thomas connection no one saw coming—RealPage, based on research for his forthcoming book, The New Landlord, Powered by Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence. Nelson revealed that RealPage was created in 1998 by real estate heir, and owner of at least one US Supreme Court Justice (Clarence Thomas) , Harlan Crow. Yeah, that Harlan Crow."

Yes, that's right, folks. Your high rent is because of price fixing, and and the company making it happen is owned by one of the billionaires most responsible for corrupting our Supreme Court.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

I'm OFFLINE UNTIL MID-SEPTEMBER, but you can catch me in person at BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

#20yrsago EFF wins Grokster! Software doesn’t have to be easy for Hollywood to wiretap! https://web.archive.org/web/20041026154633/https://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/20040819_mgm_v_grokster_decision.pdf

#15yrsago Poor design-choices in the Star Wars universe https://web.archive.org/web/20090821185001/http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2009/08/bad-designs-in-star-wars.php

#15yrsago Computers’ limitations, as seen in 1967 https://web.archive.org/web/20090823020726/http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2009/08/19/computers-their-built-in-limitations/

#15yrsago WMD swag from a chemistry conference https://web.archive.org/web/20090824144536/http://cenblog.org/2009/08/19/wmd-goodie-bag/

#15yrsago Entertainment Weekly ad with a video-screen glued to the pages https://web.archive.org/web/20090821204702/https://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/cbs-embeds-a-video-playing-ad-in-a-print-magazine/

#15yrsago Brutal military dictatorship that backs Fiji Water https://web.archive.org/web/20090816093201/http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/fiji-spin-bottle

#15yrsago Sipping Spiders Through a Straw: funny monster lyrics to traditional tunes https://memex.craphound.com/2009/08/19/sipping-spiders-through-a-straw-funny-monster-lyrics-to-traditional-tunes/

#10yrsago Copyright extortion startup wants to hijack your browser until you pay https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-outfit-wants-to-hijack-browsers-until-fine-paid-140816/

#10yrsago Militarized cops: arms dealers bribed Congress to ramboize Barney Fife https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2014/08/how-defense-industry-made-room-militarized-police-today/

#10yrsago How the US government exerts control over ICANN https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2014/08/government-control-internet-governance-icann-proposes-giving-gac-increased-power-board-decisions/

#5yrsago New Hampshire court to patent troll: it’s not libel when someone calls you a “patent troll” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/patent-troll-sues-over-patent-troll-label-loses/

#5yrsago An appreciation for Samuel Delany https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/books/samuel-delany-jordy-rosenberg.html

#5yrsago More than 20 Texas cities and towns have been taken hostage by ransomware https://dir.texas.gov/news?id=210

#5yrsago Owner of Phoenix apartment building serves eviction notices to every tenant so he can turn their homes into unlicensed hotel rooms https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/phoenix-landlord-evicts-tenants-short-term-rental-wanderjaunt-11345084

#5yrsago Ecofascism isn’t new: white supremacy and exterminism have always lurked in the environmental movement https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/15/anti

#5yrsago A cycle of renewal, broken: How Big Tech and Big Media abuse copyright law to slay competition https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/cycle-renewal-broken-how-big-tech-and-big-media-abuse-copyright-law-slay

#5yrsago The TSA strip searched a grandmother on Mother’s Day and now says that she’s overreacting because it’s no different from a locker room https://professional-troublemaker.com/2019/08/19/tsa-forced-strip-search-no-more-offensive-than-voluntarily-using-a-locker-room/

#1yrago SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/19/cooking-the-books-with-gas/#reichman-jorgensen

On SEPTEMBER 24th, I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!!

[anthrofreshtodeath]

If you feel like writing two separate prompts or combining them. Thanks!

15 please come home and

28 accidental touches

Let's do 15! It's kind of long. I honestly have no idea what this is - but reserve the right to flesh it out into a full, sprawling story if I want to? Agh, anyway. Here we go! Thank you all for sticking with me as I put these out at a glacial pace.

___

Jane pats her pockets a couple of times before she locks her door. Front, back, breast. Her wallet’s there, her phone’s close to her chest, and she’s got her keys in her hand. Her badge rests deep in the inside of her black leather jacket, invisible but available. 

“Shit,” she curses, because her guide ID rests somewhere inside the apartment, probably on the counter. She’ll need that for work. She jiggles her key in the lock until the door opens, metal and heavy and groaning when she pushes against it. This place is old in the lead-pipes-from-the-sixties way, not the late-eighteen-hundreds way her condo in Boston had been. Sometimes, she thinks about her old place with regret, how she should have kept it instead of selling it in her hurricane hurry to get out of the city. For all the ancient shit she encounters every day on her current assignment, life feels stuck in a flip phone, video rental kind of vibe that she thought she’d left in the academy. In Boston, life had, for all its modern courtrooms and BRIC software and smartphone ubiquitousness, moved at a historical pace. 

Maybe it was the family.

Jane had roots in Boston since the early twentieth century; Rizzolis hadn’t been here in Napoli since 1910. There’s nothing that the modernity here offers her in terms of mirrors - she cannot yet see herself, even though everyone around her looks like they could be a long lost cousin. And perhaps they are, but she knows no one. 

Except her coworkers, perhaps, at both of her jobs. Her narc one and her cover one. 

With a whoosh she’s back in, and she walks past the cluttered kitchen - no ID on the counter - to the small dining room table. Francesca Ricci, guida turistica di Pompeii, it reads. She hangs it around her neck and zips her jacket up over it. The gray sky hangs heavy over Naples’ city center, and so she’ll need to keep it dry. She also foregoes her motorcycle helmet next to her ID - she’ll ride the metro into work today because she doesn’t want to get pelted by rain on her bike if she takes the autostrada. 

So, with her backpack still on her shoulder, she exits a second time, and trots down the stairs to the street. She weaves through her fellow commuters on their own way, and she thinks about popping into the bar just a few storefronts from the station to get a coffee. But then, she’ll have to sit, have to look at the paper just to feel right, and she doesn’t really have the time. Instead, she motors on her long legs to Piazza Garibaldi station and swipes her pass to get on the train. 

She sees some familiar faces, a man who always puts his headphones away before getting off one stop from now, a couple of students who always talk about the same professor in a rich blend of new Neapolitan, Italian, and thirst. 

The closest open seat happens to be right behind those two students, who smile cordially when Jane passes to park herself in the next row’s aisle seat. She slumps, and drops her backpack between her flat-heeled boots, stopping to stare down at them to give her mind some rest. She lets it wander: the stickysweetness of their infatuation settles in her chest, webbing between her lungs, not quite reaching her heart where it’d cause an overdose. Here, four thousand miles away from home, she remembers the fullness of love without the sting of it. 

Luckily, she never has to listen for long, even though she yearns for simpler times when she does - in the best of ways. In that way that makes a heart feel light and easy, like things could go back to that simplicity. In a few minutes, the train signals its stop at Pompeii Scavi, her stop.

She picks up her bag and off she goes, past the exit and into the ticket sales area for the heritage site itself. “Ciao, Roberta,” she says when she waves to the elderly woman manning the closest ticket window. She doesn’t stop, but she smirks and scrunches two fingers in a wave when Roberta calls out a huffy greeting after her, saying something about always in a damn hurry. 

Roberta reminds Jane of her grandmother because they both speak the same kind of stuck-in-time Neapolitan when Jane’s around. Even though Roberta knows Jane only as Francesca, a name chosen for her brother. Jane goes right up to Porta Marina and pulls her sign from her backpack, because her first group is in five minutes and she is, above all things, prompt. 

She is also undercover, so she likes to arrive before them, watch them come in and cluster. She’s been installed because she can be inconspicuous - she ushers rich, whiny merigan’ (her grandmother’s word) through one of the richest historical sites in the world, all while keeping an eye on the Camorra men who’ve been muscled in as guards so that their bosses can keep the drug trade strong and gobble up the restoration contracts that Pompeii requires. And she looks like every other Italian doing it, except the polizia di stato like that she speaks native English and knows the grounds like the back of her hand.

That had only taken copious amounts of adderall and a few sleepless weeks to learn.

Her Italian is pretty good, too. The Neapolitan’s coming back from her childhood, and the adderall also helped the acquisition of standard Italian. She really had jumped in feet first, intent on making a life in a place her family had made life for centuries before they decided America was the best place to be. Sometimes, when she’s wandering across Pompeii’s main drag, or whispering in la Villa dei Misteri, she wonders what they’d think of her: giving it all up, running back to what they left behind so that she can nurse her ailing heart. So that she can hide.

The first of her group of ten point to her sign, however, breaking her out of her reverie, so she waves them in. “Hey hey! You guys with All Star tours?” she asks, though she knows they are. They nod, and she puts her sunglasses on. It's overcast, rainy Italy and all that, but she can’t really do a tour without them. She knows the guys she’s tailing have no idea who she is - that’s the beauty of being a foreigner - but she still refuses to show them the whites of her eyes. A habit from her DCU detective days. “Perfect. Let’s all uh, gather over here, and we’ll wait for the rest of you before going in. So - tell me: where is everyone from?”

___

Maura has paid for the private tour, because she knows the professor arranging it and, well, she has the money. It’s been literal decades since she’s been in Pompeii, the last time for her sixteenth birthday - one last hurrah before her last year of boarding school, before she headed to BCU for undergrad. She hadn’t been very sober during that visit, and of course she regrets it, not only for the lack of memories but for the shame that she’d let girls she barely knew and didn’t like pressure her into it. 

She doesn’t feel much better this morning, just a couple months away from birthday thirty-six and jet-lagged into melancholy.

Well, perhaps that is a non-truth. Not a lie, per se, but the melancholy was firmly in place when she boarded an overnight flight at Logan, one that spit her out in Naples. A car service, courtesy of her mother - quite European in her no-questions-asked approach to the situation - delivered her here, to Porta Marina. To Charles, Professor Cavalieri’s French grad student, whose eyes sparkle when they see her. She looks put together, of course, as she always does, even though she feels a little underdressed. Jeans, riding boots, a light sweater and a scarf over its neckline. April south of Rome can still be a little chilly, so she’s guarded against the weather, but not against the feeling that everyone around her disparages her for not wearing head to toe designer. Charles only notices the slope of her curves in those jeans, the elegance of her features. 

He stammers. “Uh, uh, D-doctor Isles, yes?” he manages when she approaches. She moves right past the rest of the tourists, in a line that will probably take an hour to get through, and smiles at him. 

“Yes, and you must be Charles. The professor has told me so much about you,” she says, and they kiss twice on each cheek, clasping one another’s biceps loosely. “About your expertise regarding the ruins here.”

“He has told me about you, too,” Charles says. When he pulls away, he’s collected himself, returning some sharpness to his eyes. His French accent is actually very slight. “He was shocked that you are here. He had heard that Doctor Faulkner was in the States, with intentions of finding you.”

Cavalieri knows Maura through Ian, who knew him through his undergraduate work in Switzerland. Maura did not know, until this conversation, that they still talk. She goes pale, she can see it in her hands when she brings them up to cross her arms. Funnily enough, they haven’t spoken as of three weeks ago. Or, if they had, Ian hadn’t disclosed… well. “He was. He isn’t any longer. And neither am I,” she recovers. They both chuckle. One drop falls from the Southern Italian sky onto her nose. “Are we ready to begin?”

“Of course,” Charles says. “Let’s make our way to the forum.”

“That sounds perfect. And Charles? There may be a time or two that I wander off on my own. Don’t worry about me. I’ll find you. Or…” she pauses to pull her phone from her bag, “I will text you.”

__

“And if you see those indentations in the stone, that’s where the wooden planks would have gone, and this,” Jane toes the grass and weed-covered stone underneath her and her long arms reach up close to those indentations, “bottom area is where those gladiators we talked about would have… shit. Slept. Would have slept. Above is where the… uh, give me a minute, would you? Come, come here. Come inside. You all can touch.”

Maura Isles, spector behind this entire enterprise, is standing in the ancient street, heels over the rivets made by ancient carts pulled by horses, that had delivered life itself to the city. By the thunder of Jane’s heart, rattling in her chest, the carts still run. The Camorra man Jane’d been watching for the entire tour, spending more time on his phone than guarding the ruins, has slipped away, and she cannot bring herself to care.

Maura is here. 

“Hey!” She shouts, in case the mirage, the ghost, shimmers away into the late-spring fog. “Maura!”

But, Maura doesn’t move. Maura stays put, and Maura smiles. “Hi,” she says softly, an awful lot like a real person. A real, American, Bostonian, medical examiner person. Jane shakes her head. “My god, you look…”

Jane narrows her very sleep-deprived eyes. She runs a hand through barely brushed black hair. “Like shit?” she snarks.

“I was going to say tired,” Maura replies quietly. Her hands clasp in front of her hips, and she laces her fingers together to give them something to do. “You look so tired. And like you’re not eating. Are you eating?”

Jane scoffs. “That isn’t any of your business. I’m working. You know what? I’m working. Which, by the way… how did you find me? How on Earth did you know I was here?”

“I… he’s gone,” Maura says. Jane leans against one of the old stone walls around them and crosses her arms in defense. She is long and she is gaunt. She is haggard and very angry. “He left almost a month ago. I’ve been trying to find you since then.”

“That’s…” Jane summons all the venom, all the ire she can. She grits her teeth for the effect. “None of that is my business. You made that abundantly clear.”

“I never said that,” Maura counters. The way Jane wafts toward her, the scent of despair and righteousness, Maura might topple. So her hand goes to that same wall near Jane’s shoulder. “I said I needed time. And you gave it to me in spades. Hell, you gave me time and an entire continent. I am lucky that my mother has contacts.”

“You sicced your mom on me?” Jane, incredulous, drops her hands so that they ball into fists at her sides. 

“I was willing to do anything to find you. You’ve been gone for six months. I’ve spent almost all of those figuring out where you went.”

“Allora, già sai,” Jane shouts, loud enough for several tourists to turn their way. She yanks her tone down to a poisonous whisper. “Now what do you want.”

She doesn’t ask, she demands. And it pains her because Maura is on the verge of tears, Maura is telling her that Ian is gone, and Maura has come all this way to see her, but a heart broken is a heart reluctant to open. 

“I want you to come home. Please, come home,” pleads Maura. The watery begging pulls Jane forward, but so do Maura’s hands on the lapels of her jacket. Surprisingly strong, and intoxicatingly warm. “I… I need you. I thought I needed him and the whole time he was there, I… was so empty for you,” Maura confesses. “I needed filling up and you were nowhere to be found.”

“Well you found me,” Jane is deflated. Jane closes her eyes as her last defense against the onslaught.

“So, will you come with me? Come back home? My mother would even lend us her plane,” Maura senses an in, a lowering of the defenses, so she takes it.

“No,” Jane says. When she opens her eyes again, they are resolute. But then, there is a smile. “I’m not goin’ anywhere. And, if you really want me to come around? For there to even be a chance of moving forward? You’re not goin’ anywhere, either. For a while.”

Maura cocks her head, confused, but oh is she smart. “Europe?” she asks. Jane frowns. “Italy.”

“Napoli,” Jane corrects. 

“For how long?” Maura asks, and she hasn’t said no.

“For however long it takes,” Jane says. “And you learn to work with me again before you, before we…”

“Love again,” Maura supplies, giddy off of chance.

“Ah! Ah,” Jane holds a finger up in the air. “That’s a forbidden word,” she nods in the direction of Charles, who has stayed respectfully close, but also respectfully behind. “He with you?”

“My tour guide, yes,” Maura tells her.

“Ok then. You know what’s not a forbidden word? Surveillance. Which is what I’m doin’ here. So, tell him to fuck off, join my group, and I’ll fill you in on the train.”

“The train? Like… the metro…?” Maura scrunches her nose.

“The train. You’re doin’ Napoli. With me, remember? That means public transit,” Jane says. She waits for about a dozen more people to pass, hand on Maura’s back, and then guides them over together. “Don’t worry, I’m sure your mother can get you a car once you settle in.”

Maura laughs. “Yes, Detective,” she responds.

“We’re gonna have to work on that accent,” Jane jokes. “But somethin’ tells me you’ll be a quick study. OK, Americani! Let’s keep it moving! Let me show all where the gladiators duked it out, left everything on the field, so to speak. And boy, do I mean everything.”

Something told the both of them, when they returned to Jane’s group, that they would find themselves on such a field not very long from now. Whether opposite each other or with each other, only time would tell.

[longwindedbore]

* At the heart of this investigation is RealPage, a software and consulting firm that allegedly orchestrates price-fixing among large corporate landlords. RealPage’s system, which is owned by Thoma Bravo, one of the largest private equity firms in the U.S., provides rental price recommendations to landlords. These recommendations are based on detailed real-time data shared by landlords, including pricing, inventory, and occupancy rates. RealPage’s influence is extensive, affecting rents for 70% of multi-family apartment buildings and 16 million units across the country.

The scheme allegedly works by encouraging landlords to adopt RealPage’s pricing recommendations, which they do 80-90% of the time. This coordinated effort among landlords to follow the software’s suggestions drives up rental prices by reducing the availability of units. As one of RealPage’s architects reportedly stated, the goal is to prevent landlords from undervaluing their properties, thereby ensuring higher rents nationwide.*

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

EDITORIAL

Is there a difference in the DOJ between administrations?

YES: both political parties, including presidential candidates, accept donations from Big Corporations, and Political Action Committees (often the same entities).

HOWEVER there is a SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE between policies of administrations and legislative majorities.

OBVIOUSLY we live in a corrupt system resistant to change.

The Rich and their surrogates in institutions lecture the 95% of us that we should be investing (or tithing) instead of buying I-phones or lattes, food, etc.

In actuality the Rich aren’t ‘investing’ to create new markets and growth. As was more the case in times past.

Instead they’re wealth comes from hegemonic depredations which they can easily hide with their hegemony on the media.

The stock market has changed from a means to raise capital for new ventures to a gigantic legalized Ponzi scheme to drive up the value of the stock bonuses that are 90% of the compensation for the top floor execs and directors so that they can borrow against their monopoly-money value.

Voting could change this

The old anti-trust laws are on the books. We could have done this in the Obama Admin.

Alas, the #%^*£€¥ ‘progressives’ who failed to vote in the off-year 2010 elections wiped out Dems large majotlrities in Congress

The loss of the majorities torpedoing any chance of Obama resurrecting the anti-trust laws, the Congress and DOJ investigating the ‘derivatives’ Ponzi scheme and breaking up the ‘too big to fail’ banks. Then the aerospace duopoly, pharmaceuticals, insurance bastards, etc.

Not voting matters!

And, yeah, “voting within the system won’t change the system”. No shit?

Did “punishing the Dems” improve things when #%^*¥£€> ‘progressives didn’t vote their MAJORITIES in 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2022???

[fresh-bag-of-ham]

Wait sorry could you elaborate a little about that housing post? My experience (heavily influenced by college towns to be clear) has been that landlord corporations will buy up single family homes quickly for cash, which means that 1) there is a shortage of housing for people who want to purchase homes rather than rent, 2) the landlord companies are extremely predatory and rent to students charging them each $$$$ to live there no matter how many people are living in the house, and 3) building new housing, including multifamily apartments, does nothing to fix this because it's built by developer corporations that set ridiculously high rents and don't care if many of the units are unoccupied. I can see how the proposed legislation would do nothing but shift who's getting screwed over, but I don't see how "build more housing" on its own actually fixes the root issue if the new housing is just as expensive + it's still the predatory landlord companies owning everything. But I also don't know very much about this outside of my general observations.

Yes, I can elaborate!

There's a shortage of housing for everyone in the US, period, which is making the housing that does exist more valuable, period. This makes owning a rental property a great investment (super low vacancy rate!), and it also makes buying a condo purely as somewhere to stash your money for a while a great investment (price almost guaranteed to be higher when you sell it later!). All this competition does make it harder for people who want to buy a home just to live in themselves, but the investors they're competing against are reacting ""rationally"" to a general scarcity that already exists.

College towns, because of the relatively fixed base demand of students needing places to live close to campus, are unfortunately really prone to predatory landlords -- I mean, I was in college 2006-2010 when the housing bubble burst and there was basically no effect on student rent prices. All 25,000 of us students were still all competing for the same scrubby rental houses.

[much elaboration below the cut...]

What does affect the student housing prices is changing land use code to allow mid-rise apartment buildings. The new housing was expensive, top of the market, sure, but buildings are crazy expensive to build right now, and the building is also pretty nice. So suddenly the wealthiest 1,000 students are living in the brand new 20-story building with the in-house pool and gym, and now there's only 24,000 students chasing the same scrubby rental houses. The effect on prices is far from immediate, but after a few mid-rise apartment buildings go up, after you get maybe 5,000 new units to the market, people have more options and the natural vacancy rate starts creeping up? The owners of the scrubbiest rental houses start to worry. With so many other options for renters, do they have to lower rents to compete? Fix up their units? Or do they have to sell off a couple properties, maybe the ones furthest from campus? Or do they have to get out of the business altogether?

This is overly simplified of course, and, depending on other factors, increasing housing supply might only result in less upward pressure on rent prices, but you can actually see all the 'how to get rich without working' passive income bros start to freak out in real time on twitter when a town where they own a small rental empire starts upzoning and issuing building permits, because what they're exploiting to make money is housing scarcity.

There are a couple of general ideas around this floating around in various states of exaggeration that are misrepresentations or distortions of reality. To address a couple...

This video addresses the idea that inspired the proposed legislation from a few days ago, the idea that the housing shortage is being caused by Wall Street investors buying up single-family homes.

This article is really important in addressing something you mentioned, the idea that landlords "don't care if many of the units are unoccupied". The number of unoccupied units, otherwise known as the vacancy rate (and its inverse, the occupancy rate), is something landlords care a lot about.

This in-depth report describes a relatively new company that offers landlords not just software, but access to a dataset of all rental rates in their area. Not just asking rents for available listed units, but all rents being charged for every unit. Using this dataset, the software recommends that landlords set their rents some amount higher and accept a (slightly) lower occupancy rate.

The company had been seeking occupancy levels of 97% or 98% in markets where it was a leader, Winn said. But when it began using YieldStar, managers saw that raising rents and leaving some apartments vacant made more money. “Initially, it was very hard for executives to accept that they could operate at 94% or 96% and achieve a higher NOI by increasing rents,” Winn said on the call, referring to net operating income. The company “began utilizing RealPage to operate at 95%, while seeing revenue increases of 3% to 4%.”

I feel like people are imagining a building with maybe 20% vacancy? Maybe 30% vacancy if you were imagining a particularly greedy landlord?? But this article describes a shift from 2-3% vacancy (basically enough to allow a short turnover period between tenants) to 5% vacancy. And even that, the landlords could hardly stomach at first! Because vacant units feels like leaving money on the table, it goes against all their business sense.

But a shift from 2-3% to 5% vacancy still takes some units off the market, right? Well, yes, but a) I wouldn't call that "many", and b) in the grand scheme of things it means waiting a couple more months between tenancies. That's certainly not good, but the far more devastating effect of this scheme is that a small increase in the vacancy rate is no longer a downward force on rent prices.

So let's say they've been operating at 98% occupancy, charging $1000/mo rent. To take in 4% more revenue at 95% occupancy, that's basically a 7% increase in rent, $1073/mo. At that price, for revenue to fall back to what they'd been making before at 98% occupancy (which presumably was enough to cover operating expenses), the occupancy would have to drop to 91%.

So where this company would previously only tolerate maybe a 3% vacancy before dropping rents to fill their available units, this company now would tolerate a 9% vacancy rate in theory. Because of the demand for housing being what it is they're operating at 5% vacancy and just raking in profits like they describe.

On the one hand, this is definitely a huge problem. This company's software has become incredibly prevalent among landlords across the country, and the DOJ is currently investigating this company for antitrust violations because of the data sharing and price-setting that this company/algorithm has enabled. So that's encouraging!

On the other hand, this whole scheme wouldn't even be possible if we didn't have a housing shortage to begin with. In a housing surplus, the first building to fall below their vacancy threshold would have to start lowering rents and leasing more units to cover the difference, those additional units on the market would start to increase vacancy rates in other buildings and they'd do the same thing, and the whole house of cards would collapse.

tl;dr: Yes, the new housing itself (without subsidies from every level of government to build an affordable housing development) will likely be top of the market (after all, it's brand new) but housing scarcity generally allows everybody to jack up rents and behave predatorily, even the landlords of the oldest and shittiest rentals, and the only counter against that that doesn't leave somebody out in the cold is to increase housing supply.

[seth-the-giggle-fish]

By

Hannah Garden-Monheit and Ken Merber

March 1, 2024

Landlords and property managers can’t collude on rental pricing. Using new technology to do it doesn’t change that antitrust fundamental. Regardless of the industry you’re in, if your business uses an algorithm to determine prices, a brief filed by the FTC and the Department of Justice offers a helpful guideline for antitrust compliance: your algorithm can’t do anything that would be illegal if done by a real person.

Today, the FTC and Department of Justice took action to fight algorithmic collusion in the residential housing market. The agencies filed a joint legal brief explaining that price fixing through an algorithm is still price fixing. The brief highlights key aspects of competition law important for businesses in every industry: (1) you can’t use an algorithm to evade the law banning price-fixing agreements, and (2) an agreement to use shared pricing recommendations, lists, calculations, or algorithms can still be unlawful even where co-conspirators retain some pricing discretion or cheat on the agreement.

The agencies’ work in this space is especially important given rising residential housing rental prices. Rent is up nearly 20% since 2020, with the largest increases concentrated on lower- and middle-tier apartments rented by lower-income consumers. About half of renters now pay more than 30% of their income in rent and utilities, and rising shelter costs were responsible for over two-thirds of January inflation.

Meanwhile, landlords increasingly use algorithms to determine their prices, with landlords reportedly using software like “RENTMaximizer” and similar products to determine rents for tens of millions of apartments across the country. Efforts to fight collusion are even more critical given private equity-backed consolidation among landlords and property management companies. The considerable leverage these firms already have over their renters is only exacerbated by potential algorithmic price collusion. Algorithms that recommend prices to numerous competing landlords threaten to remove renters’ ability to vote with their feet and comparison-shop for the best apartment deal around.

What’s the message for other businesses?

Agreeing to use an algorithm is an agreement. In algorithmic collusion, a pricing algorithm combines competitor data and spits out the suggested “maximized” rent for a unit given local conditions. Such software can allow landlords to collude on pricing by using an algorithm—something the law doesn’t allow IRL. When you replace once-independent pricing decisions with a shared algorithm, expect trouble. Competitors using a shared human agent to fix prices? Illegal. Doing the same thing but with an agreed upon, shared algorithm? Still illegal. It’s also irrelevant that the algorithm maker isn’t a direct competitor if you and your competitors each agree to use their product knowing the others are doing the same in concert.

Price deviations don’t immunize conspirators. Some things in life might require perfection, but price-fixing arrangements aren’t one of them. Just because a software recommends rather than determines a price doesn’t mean it’s legal. Setting initial starting prices or recommending initial starting prices can be illegal, even if conspirators deviate from recommended prices. And even if some of the conspirators cheat by starting with lower prices than those the algorithm recommended, that doesn’t necessarily change things. Being bad at breaking the law isn’t a defense.

The housing industry isn’t alone in using potentially illegal collusive algorithms. The Department of Justice has previously secured a guilty plea related to the use of pricing algorithms to fix prices in online resales, and has an ongoing case against sharing of price-related and other sensitive information among meat processing competitors. Other private cases have been recently brought against hotels and casinos.

Technology is a promise. Used correctly, it can make our lives healthier, safer, and more efficient. But its efficiency can also be used by bad actors to crush competition or bilk consumers in novel ways. No matter the tool law violators use, the FTC and the Department of Justice stand vigilant on the side of consumers and competition.

Hannah Garden-Monheit is Director of the FTC’s Office of Policy Planning and Ken Merber is Deputy Assistant Director of the FTC’s Anticompetitive Practices II Division. 

[mariacallous]

RealPage says it isn’t doing anything wrong by suggesting to landlords how much rent they could charge. In a move to reclaim its own narrative, the property management software company published a microsite and a digital booklet it’s calling “The Real Story,” as it faces multiple lawsuits and a reported federal criminal probe related to allegations of rental price fixing.

RealPage’s six-page digital booklet, published on the site in mid-June, addresses what it calls “false and misleading claims about its software”—the myriad of allegations it faces involving price-fixing and rising rents—and contends that the software benefits renters and landlords and increases competition. It also said landlords accept RealPage’s price recommendations for new leases less than 50 percent of the time and that the software recommends competitive prices to help fill units.

“‘The heart of this case’ never had a heartbeat—the data clearly shows that RealPage does not set customers’ prices and customers do what they believe is best for their respective properties to vigorously compete against each other in the market,” the digital booklet says.

But landlords are left without concrete answers, as questions around the legality of this software are ongoing as they continue renting properties. “I don’t think we’re seeing this as a RealPage issue but rather as a revenue management software issue,” says Alexandra Alvarado, the director of marketing and education at the American Apartment Owners Association, the largest association of landlords in the US.

Alvarado says some landlords are taking pause and asking questions before using the tech. Software like RealPage “has made it much easier to understand what is happening in the market,” Alvarado says. “Technology has helped us in so many ways to make all these processes more efficient. In this case, it’s now borderline too efficient.” And members of the AAOA are asking questions about the legality of revenue management, she says. “The first thing landlords typically think is, what is the legal repercussion? Am I going to be in trouble for using this software? If the answer is maybe, it’s usually off the table.”

Dana Jones, president and CEO of RealPage, said in a statement released alongside the booklet that “the time is now to address a number of false claims about RealPage’s revenue management software, and how rental housing providers operate when setting rent prices.” RealPage did not respond to WIRED’s queries asking what prompted the lengthy statement in June. Officials appear to be narrowing in on RealPage, as the Justice Department is allegedly planning to sue the company, according to a report from Politico last week. The company declined a request to comment on the latest in the ongoing Department of Justice probe.

Allegations of price-fixing that may constitute antitrust violations have dogged the software company since late 2022, when ProPublica published an investigation alleging that RealPage’s software was linked to rent rises in some US cities, as the company used private, aggregated data provided by its customers to suggest rental prices. (In response to ProPublica's reporting, RealPage commented that it “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”)

RealPage’s software is powerful because it anonymizes rental data and can provide landlords and property managers with nonpublic and public data about rentals, which may be different from that advertised publicly on platforms like real estate marketplace Zillow. The company contends that it’s not engaging in price-fixing, as landlords are not forced to accept the rents that RealPage’s algorithm suggests. Sometimes it even recommends landlords lower the rent, RealPage claims. But antitrust enforcers have alleged that even sharing private information via an algorithm and using it for price recommendations can be as conspiratorial as back-room handshake deals, even if landlords don’t end up renting apartments at those rates. The reported antitrust investigation is ongoing.

RealPage’s algorithmic pricing model is among one of the first subject to scrutiny, perhaps due to its involvement in housing, a necessity that has ballooned in price as housing supply languishes. Typical rent in the US is just under $2,000, according to Zillow, up from around $1,500 in early 2020. “Housing affordability is a national problem created by economic and political forces—not by the use of revenue management software,” Realpage says. But renters can’t tell whether their rates are rising because of algorithms or not.

“It’s almost impossible to know if you are just a spectator or a victim,” says Shanti Singh, legislative and communications director with Tenants Together, a California-based coalition of tenants activists. If tenants call a hotline over raised rent or fees, “we’re not necessarily going to be able to see or connect that their landlord is using RealPage.”

The state of Arizona sued RealPage and nine landlords in February, claiming a conspiracy between the company and landlords led renters in Phoenix and Tucson to pay “millions of dollars” more in rent. That followed a similar lawsuit out of Washington, DC. In the capital’s greater metropolitan area, more than 90 percent of rental units in large apartment buildings were priced using RealPage software, according to DC’s attorney general.

The cases against RealPage puts algorithmic pricing to the test; as the technology becomes more common, antitrust law has yet to keep pace. Officials have other concerns around algorithms used for alleged hotel price fixing, as well as e-commerce algorithms. ��The concern of regulators that algorithms can be used in ways that harm competition—that idea is here to stay,” says Ed Rogers, a partner at law firm Ballard Spahr who focuses on antitrust cases. “RealPage could end up really being a test case, not just for the real estate rental industry but for this aspect of AI and software and its role in a competitive landscape.”

The impact of algorithmic pricing varies greatly. Amazon has been accused of pushing up prices with a secret algorithm. (Amazon has said the “allegation that we somehow force sellers to use our optional services is simply not true.”) But others operate in plain sight, like dynamic pricing for rideshare costs, and don’t involve multiple companies sharing information. Not all of these algorithms are engaged in activity that may be considered anticompetitive. A Nevada judge in May dismissed a suit brought by hotel guests against several Las Vegas hotel operators, finding there was no agreement among them to fix prices using shared algorithms.

Yardi Systems, another US property management company, is also facing a class action suit regarding antitrust violations for artificially inflating rent prices. The company has said it did “nothing illegal,” as it does not mandate rent prices through its software or make “collusive pricing decisions.”

Typical rental costs in Phoenix have increased by more than about $500 a month from April 2020 to 2024, and by around $400 in Washington, DC, in the same period, according to Zillow.

Renters have also filed numerous class action suits against RealPage and property owners that have been consolidated. Some landlords named in those settled claims earlier this year. The court threw out a lawsuit regarding price fixing for student housing but has said the class action from renters can go forward. Attorneys representing some of the plaintiffs in the class action did not respond to requests to comment.

RealPage laid off about 4 percent of staff in June. “RealPage is hyper-focused on innovation and accelerating its business growth in 2024 and beyond, and as a result has made the decision to eliminate a small number of roles within the company,” Jennifer Bowcock, a spokesperson for the company, says. The layoffs were not connected to the antitrust lawsuit, she says. Thoma Bravo, the owner of RealPage, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

As of 2020, RealPage said it was collecting data on some 16 million rental units across the US. There are 44 million renter households in the US, and nearly 22 million rental units are owned by for-profit businesses. RealPage grew when it acquired Lease Rent Options (LRO) in 2017, after clearing antitrust scrutiny by the Justice Department. The DOJ did not comment on questions from WIRED about its reported investigation into RealPage or its approval of RealPage’s acquisition of Lease Rent Options in 2017.

When asked about the latest in the probe, RealPage referred to a portion of its recent lengthy statement, which said: “The DOJ extensively reviewed LRO and YieldStar in 2017, without objecting to, much less challenging, any feature of the products.” RealPage also says that its “products are fundamentally the same today” as they were when the acquisition received approval.

In June, The New York Times asked assistant US attorney general Jonathan Kanter, the Justice Department’s top antitrust official, if he would view an AI tool communicating pricing information as the same as humans colluding, with the question referencing the reported RealPage investigation. Kanter replied: “I often say that if your dog bites somebody, you’re responsible for your dog biting somebody. If your AI fixes prices, you’re just as responsible.”

The Justice Department also last year filed a statement of interest in the RealPage combined class action lawsuit, as the case could become a precedent setter in algorithmic pricing. The statement mirrored Kanter’s argument that the method of price setting doesn’t matter, and algorithms are just the latest evolution in information gathering and sharing.

“In-person handshakes gave way to phone and fax, and later to email. Algorithms are the new frontier,” the Justice Department argued in a statement of interest it filed in the class action lawsuit against RealPage and landlords. “And, given the amount of information an algorithm can access and digest, this new frontier poses an even greater anti-competitive threat than the last.”

[usoffers]

Get Your Rental Assistance!

How do I apply for emergency rental assistance?

You follow thru your nearby emergency condominium help (generation) software. Every local program has some flexibility in how they set up guidelines and approaches to healthy the desires in their local network. For example, in some regions, you could apply for condominium help your self. In different regions, landlords want to submit an application first.

What does emergency rental assistance cover?

The federal generation software lets in neighborhood applications to cowl lease, utilities, and domestic energy expenses. This includes energy, fuel, gasoline oil, water and sewer, and trash removal. If your landlord normally pays for utilities or home energy costs, those are counted as a part of your rent.

Rental assistance may also cover:

Reasonable past due expenses (if no longer protected to your apartment or application debt)

Internet provider to your property

Shifting charges and different condominium-related costs (together with safety deposits, application charges, or screening expenses) for households who have to transport

A few programs may additionally provide housing counseling, case management, criminal representation, and other housing stability services.

[tituszppk155]

Property and houses for sale - Real Estate Agent London Ontario

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Household Real Estate Professionals Residential Property

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[harumiflag]

Panasonic in HARUMI FLAG, Tokyo, 2020

Harumi Flag, a new urban development project located in the Harumi 5-Chome District, has been launched. This development is touted as one of the legacies of the Tokyo 2020 Games.

This 18-hectare area will hold 5,632 privately-owned and rental apartments in 23 buildings. It will accommodate a total of 12,000 residents by 2024.

Energy Management

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government, in partnership with ten private companies, is planning to redevelop the buildings that hosted the Olympic Village of the 2020 Games into an urban town called HARUMI FLAG. The new town will incorporate residential condominiums, child care facilities, and senior housing to accommodate a wide variety of people’s lifestyles and needs.

The town will use hydrogen as its primary power source, though conventional grid-supplied electricity can be used to supplement it. The area will also use solar generation and power storage systems in common-use spaces in 21 high rises that are now under construction.

In addition to providing hydrogen, HARUMI FLAG will also utilize an area energy management system** to monitor and control electricity consumption in each of the town’s residential blocks. Data from each block will be analyzed by the energy management system to lower reliance on conventional grid-supplied power and to help predict peak demand. By using these solutions, HARUMI FLAG will become an innovative model for sustainable development.

Security & Disaster Prevention

HARUMI FLAG is the name of the game in the snazzy new town being developed by a handful of well-heeled developers. This 13.9 hectare urban village will rewrite the rules of urban renewal and make Tokyo a more livable city for all. Panasonic is proud to be a part of this bold initiative that promises a new era in city planning and management.

Aside from the requisite security and surveillance, the real show stoppers are a handful of innovative features and technologies that will leave a lasting impression on visitors of all ages. Among these is the aforementioned 750 network-connected cameras which send pictures and videos to a specialized emergency response center. Other gizmos include a virtual reality experience which will give the residents a sense of what's in store when they move into their new home in 2024. Moreover, the aforementioned technology is matched with a smart phone enabled security system that will notify users via text message and email as soon as a break-in is detected.

Public Area Lighting

HARUMI FLAG is the first town in Japan with a full-scale hydrogen energy infrastructure system that includes a station, pipelines and hydrogen fuel cell generators. A group of private companies, leveraging the expertise and funds of the Tokyo government, is engaged in unified development and operation of this 18-hectare area.

Panasonic is a key player in this project, offering a comprehensive package of urban development solutions including Hydrogen Power Generation, Energy Management and Security & Disaster Prevention. 750 network-connected cameras are also deployed in town areas and common-use spaces to ensure security for residents. Finally, the HARUMI FLAG sales center features a cutting-edge VR (virtual reality) display that demonstrates how to make the most of a small screen in a large space using a high-brightness laser display. It is a highly entertaining experience. It’s also a smart way to get a glimpse of a future town in the making. The technology is a product of the long and close partnership between Panasonic and the Tokyo metropolitan government.

Virtual Reality Experience

Virtual reality (VR) is computer technology that makes you feel like you are in another place. The software produces images, sounds and other sensations to create a world that appears to be real, but it's all a simulation. Check their site to know more details HARUMI FLAG／晴海フラッグ

A VR system typically requires a headset, a computer, and a device that creates a 3D environment. It may also have sensors that can collect stimuli response information and send it back to the VR system to improve the experience.

A number of industries are benefiting from VR technology, including science and medicine, entertainment, education and real estate. A VR system could allow a doctor to practice procedures with virtual patients without putting them at risk, for example, or architects can show detailed plans in 3D before a building is built.