Neighborhood in the News is usually a monthly feature, at most, and we just published one a week ago. But we didn’t think this news could wait.
In case you missed it, DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb is suing a real estate tech firm and 14 of the District’s largest apartment owners, accusing them of conspiring to fix rent prices. As the Washington City Paper reports: “He alleges that [RealPage] and 14 of its clients exchanged confidential pricing information to jack up rents for more than 50,000 apartments across the District, forcing tenants to pay millions more than they would’ve in a traditional real estate market.”
Writes The Washington Post: “The suit, filed in D.C. Superior Court, said landlords agreed to use RealPage’s centralized system, which suggests rental prices based on supply and demand, rather than compete against one another.”
And from DCist: “Landlords using RealPage’s software have allegedly advertised that it allows them to charge up to 20% more than they would otherwise, while RealPage itself represents that landlords can increase revenue by 2-7% by using its price-setting software. ”
The 14 landlords named in the suit include W.C. Smith (The Frontenac), AvalonBay (AVA and Avalon), Equity Residential (3003 Van Ness), Highmark Residential (Ellicott House) and Gables Residential (Yuma Gardens).
The case of the BK cars: We’ve been puzzling over this since we first spotted four Toyota Camrys with Florida plates behind the former Van Ness Burger King in May.
Overflow from the Avis car rental shop just down the alley? It did not seem so, as the cars never moved, and at least two of them developed flat tires in the interim.
The latest developments: Yellow impound stickers on the windshield, and by the time Popville wrote about them on November 2nd, the cars had been moved and a chain link fence erected around the drive thru area. A Popville reader says six cars in total were parked in the alley between ZIPS dry cleaners and the Flagship car wash. And though the November 2nd Popville post about the mystery yielded a number of comments, no one seems to know for sure why someone (or someones) left the vehicles there.