Episode #7: Voters Want Antitrust! with Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes

We talk to the highest-ranking law enforcement official in Arizona about her lawsuit against RealPage for algorithmin price-fixing of rent, and how that case is resonating in the election campaign.

Welcome to the podcast Organized Money. You can listen to today’s episode with Kris Mayes on Apple, on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s Election Day, and no matter who you’re voting for there are going to be a lot of changes coming after we get the results: a new president, maybe a change in control of the House and the Senate. There is no shortage of storylines for how we got here. But we heard about an interesting story that we wanted to bring to you on today’s episode.

Earlier this year, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued a bunch of corporate landlords and a software company called RealPage for illegally raising rents in Phoenix and Tucson with an algorithm, hiking the cost of rent by as much as 20 percent in the process. RealPage aggregates a bunch of landlords in a metro area (over 70 percent of the landlords in Phoenix, for example), gets them to share proprietary information, feeds that into their software and encourages landlords to coordinate specific rent hikes. Mayes calls it an illegal price-fixing conspiracy, only with algorithms instead of three CEOs in a back room.

Her lawsuit went viral on social media. And what we started to hear was that, when volunteers for candidates from Kamala Harris on down went out to knock on doors in Arizona and rally voters for the election, they kept hearing one thing: “Are you with Kris Mayes? We love that lawsuit she did against RealPage!” Mayes isn’t even on the ballot this year, but voters associated government action with her work trying to stop illegal rent hikes.

So we wanted to talk to Attorney General Mayes about why she sued RealPage, how her views were shaped about corporate power, and what’s happening in the election in this critical swing state. Rent, antitrust, corporate power, and politics, all in one episode.

Listen via Apple:

Or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for listening, and let us know how we’re doing in the comments or by responding directly to this email.

-Matt and Dave

(pic via Gage Skidmore)