this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
659 points (99.1% liked)

News

23014 readers
8 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
  • A group of lawsuits accuse large landlords of price-fixing the market rate of rent in the United States
  • A complaint filed by Washington D.C.’s Attorney General alleges 14 landlords in the district are sharing competitively sensitive data through RealPage, a real estate software provider
  • RealPage recommends prices for roughly 4.5 million housing units in the United States
  • RealPage told CNBC that its landlord customers are under no obligation to take their price suggestions

A group of renters in the U.S. say their landlords are using software to deliver inflated rent hikes.

“We’ve been told as tenants by employees of Equity that the software takes empathy out of the equation. So they can charge whatever the software tells them to charge,” said Kevin Weller, a tenant at Portside Towers since 2021.

Tenants say the management started to increase prices substantially after giving renters concessions during the Covid-19 pandemic.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 97 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Good for you though, that was a satisfying read.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I mean I'm glad it worked out right in the end. At the time I was just pissed, though.

Also, holy shit, I went back to look up some of the saga in my old emails, and there were definitely parts that were entertaining that I'd totally forgotten about. If you liked reading the summary check this out -- this is a short excerpt from one of some very long email exchanges I had about the whole thing:

Hey, I just logged in to look at sending a check for this month and I still see a balance for last month. Did you decide not to cash my check? I'm not paying additional fees. I'm fine paying for my utilities. Charging me a late fee when I had a credit, that you didn't decide to apply until after the bill was due, is ridiculous. Charging me a fee to store my credit card, when you're refusing to un-store my credit card when I ask you to, is ridiculous. Again my bank's take on it when I talked to them about it was that it "sounds illegal." I'm sorta shocked that people put up with this + do business with you. Anyway let me know - just like last month, I'm fine sending you a check for what I actually owe you.

We have not received a check for your previous balance at this time. Once your check has been applied to the previous balance, you will receive an email notification. Until then, the full balance is still due on your account.

Okay, sure. I just sent via certified mail a check for $248.93. That represents:

  • $299.96, the amount currently on my account according to you for the past 2 months.
  • -$4 for the card storage fee from this bill (again, please stop storing my card; your system will not allow me to remove it)
  • -$4 for the card storage fee from March's invoice
  • -$8.11 for late fee from March's invoice
  • -$5.08 for late fee from February's invoice
  • -$4.84 for late fee from January's invoice
  • -$25 for returned item fee from January's invoice (I told you not to bill me, because I didn't owe you money - I'm happy that you eventually applied my credit to this balance instead of trying to collect more without authorization, but me putting a stop on you trying to bill me without authorization for money I don't owe you is 100% legitimate)

So in total $248.93. If there's anything above you feel like is justified let me know ... if (management agency) tries to take collection action against me for any of the nonsense above I plan to defend myself. I'm happy paying utilities and will not be paying random additional amounts of money. Hopefully that seems reasonable but whether or not it's acceptable to you, it's what I'll be doing. IDK why you guys do business this way, but best of luck with it I guess. So the check, I sent to this address:

(photo)

Like this:

(photo)

The post office said they couldn't find your address. The best they could find was this (and I swear this is what they showed me, I'm not being funny):

(photo - their address is on Ritchie Road, but the post office I swear to God corrected it to "Bitchie Road")

So, that's where I sent it, certified mail. They said expected delivery is May 25th. Again, best of luck.

There's more, including me threatening to charge them a late fee for the time when they owed me money and weren't willing to credit it back to me, but that's as much as I had time to dig back up right now.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I 100% believe we should charge companies a fee for any mistakes they made that we had to spend time correcting.

I know banks do this in the UK if you complain and they're in the wront.

All companies should do this. Watch how fast they'd fix their shit when there's a fincial penny related to shit service.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

"Corporations are people" in the U.S. when it comes to privileges, but never when it comes to penalties.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Wtf is a “card storage fee”?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Fuckin' don't get me started.

When I stopped the payment with my bank in January, their system refused to let me use ACH payments anymore, and said I had to put in a credit card number in order to even log in and see my balance and history. Okay, sure. I put in a credit card number for a cash card that didn't have any money on it.

Then, their system said that I couldn't remove my credit card number from their system without putting in some other payment method (which had to be another credit card). But, in order to have a card number stored in their system (which I couldn't remove), I had to pay a $4 per month credit card storage fee.

This was when I started just mailing them checks and researching lawyers in Texas so I could take them to small claims court. I also sent the whole thing with documentation to the FTC explaining it as succinctly as I could.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

What I read “ … Texas …”. Ouch, sorry to read that. I doubt that is legal in other states (or rather I’m sure it’s illegal in some other states).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Every credit card number is engraved on a golden plate which is stored in a special nuclear war-proof bunker and guarded by men with automatic weapons and combat armor.

You can't expect all that for free.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago

No it wasn’t. He shoulda taken them to court sued and gotten on record this company acts this way so we hav precedent for this situation. In this story. No one wins. Company didn’t keep their security deposit and the renters time was wasted completely. No one won lol