1. Pick a rental rate. This can be based on public data, nonpublic data, or totally made-up.
2. "Strongly encourage" your users/customers to use the rate you picked.
3. 90% of your users/customers agree (historically speaking), legal collusion achieved.
That's what got them whacked in the DOJ investigation/indictment though?
https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...
> For tenants, the system upends the practice of negotiating with apartment building staff. RealPage discourages bargaining with renters and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money.
...
> Apartment managers can reject the software’s suggestions, but as many as 90% are adopted, according to former RealPage employees.
You've got what was at one point a broadly accessible necessity, various degrees of government subsidy and market intervention, a bunch of ancillary industries trying to get their place on the coattails enshrined in law, etc, etc. Then that feedback loop was let to run for a couple generations and you get the current shit.
And it can't easily or promptly be cut back because it's such a huge fraction of commerce (slavery was 12% gdp in its day for comparison) that so many people would take a haircut that you'd start a war if you tried to do anything decisive. But on some level you have to, because to quote Tucker Carlson. "there's more to a national economy than real-estate and high finance" (specifically selected to be inflammatory, not like he's anywhere near the only one saying this).