Multifamily Revenue Management in the Dock (Again)

If, like me, you’ve spent a lot of years working in revenue management, you will be familiar with the reality that from time to time, you have to defend what you do for a living. We find ourselves in just such a situation, as a recent article published by ProPublica: “Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why,” is the latest to inform us on how revenue management works. Observers of the industry cannot miss this article, as it appears to have occasioned a high-profile class action lawsuit filed in a San Diego court. The lawsuit is not the subject of this blog. But as usual, when I read criticism of revenue management that stems from a misunderstanding of how it works, I feel duty-bound to respond. There are three important claims that the article gets wrong, each of which I will address below.  Misunderstanding Cause and Effect ProPublica strongly suggests that revenue management software is causal in driving up rents across the market. It uses two sources of information to substantiate this claim: Publicly available quotes from revenue management “experts” and context-free statistics relating to performance.  For example, the statement that an operator “outperforms their market by 4.8%,” when placed alongside an unrelated quote about how revenue management software drives large rent increases, might look like cause and effect to the untrained eye. But those who understand multifamily revenue management know that a 4.8% outperformance is not the same as a 4.8% inflation of prices, as the article suggests.  Operators improve performance by making better,…