It takes a LOT of rent increase (in a short period of time) to make up for even a month or two of lost rent. Literally one month of rent lost (due to vacancy) would require all the following months rent to be 8.5%ish higher to make up for it if you wanted to recoup within the next year.
Vacancies kill returns, because you aren't actually getting paid - at all - for the thing that you make money off of.
Long term (very long term) more modest improvements could of course pay off - BUT, that shortly would require you be way outside the market rates if you had many vacancies, or doing completely impossible things like 100%+ increases in rent y/y to not lose money.
Now if you're able to corner the market, maybe. But good luck actually successfully doing that, since people are generally able to move, live with relatives, live in RVs, live in tent encampments, etc. if you try.
The problem here is they apparently DID corner the market in some area's. With apparently nearly 70% of some area's Realtors using the software. Given rents went up 18% across the US between 2017 to 2022 (and I believe it's continued as such but I didn't find good numbers quickly) it's entirely possible to reach your 8.5% increase in tightly controled areas.
That is ~ 3.6% a year, mostly during COVID and massive currency creation by the fed? And if you look at the chart, notice how the rent trendline almost exactly follows the inflation trendline?
Near as I can tell, it was inflation being exported from the cities into the rest of the country as remote work let people leave the highly congested area with their bigger city salaries. So what would have been higher than that rent in the cities became higher rent EVERYWHERE.
Which in some areas may indeed have also allowed realtors to do some of the pricing tricks, but none of the actual data seems to indicate it was anything but business as usual?
This seems like more 'make an article to draw clicks' than anything real?
Vacancies kill returns, because you aren't actually getting paid - at all - for the thing that you make money off of.
Long term (very long term) more modest improvements could of course pay off - BUT, that shortly would require you be way outside the market rates if you had many vacancies, or doing completely impossible things like 100%+ increases in rent y/y to not lose money.
Now if you're able to corner the market, maybe. But good luck actually successfully doing that, since people are generally able to move, live with relatives, live in RVs, live in tent encampments, etc. if you try.