I think you might have the problem backwards. Realpage was about buyer collusion, and that wouldn't look any different from the prices naturally just rising in a market with more demand/less supply because even sellers who aren't colluding would still raise their prices if they saw that that was the going rate in the area.
When there are multiple competing factors all influencing price simultaneously it's very hard to accurately determine how much any particular factor contributed, or what the "actual price" would have been without them.
This is actually essentially the problem that justifies markets as an efficient way to arrive at fair prices - it's computationally too expensive to calculate the precise supply/demand ratios at any given moment, and demand can change much faster than supply can adjust (and nobody could ever really know how elastic demand is for things like local housing markets anyway).
So sellers want to respond to changes in demand by raising prices, because the business model of housing rentals is matching short term demand/pricing/risk to long term costs/costs/risk. But every buyer has their own demand preferences and every supplier has a different product with different fixed costs, and everybody knows their own demand preference and ability to provide supply, so the aggregate price a market settles at "collapses" all that information without explicit coordination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
If there truly is an increase in demand, as a buyer you probably do want rents to increase, because otherwise you get shortages like in Berlin where there is nothing to rent. So that's why coordinating to withold inventory with other sellers is bad, it creates a shortage anyway and only a small number of participants need to do it to move the entire market
There is enough turnover with new listings to find the market rate while preventing existing tenants from being screwed over by unreasonable prices.
Australia also almost entirely works off rentals owned by individuals who own 1-3 properties rather than corporate owners so no one landlord has any sway over the market.
I think this narrative is just meant to distract people from questioning the necessity of the landlord class, they want people angry at a faceless corporate boogieman instead of local landlords (for obvious reasons)
What else do you expect "collective bargaining" to do in a market where every tenant has a different landlord? Your landlord isn't going to care if the tenants of 10,000 other landlords threaten to move out. They only care if you threaten to move out, and then to credibly do that what you need is to show them the unit you could move into which is asking for less.
The real problem is that you need the unit you can threaten to move into to first exist, rather than its construction being inhibited by zoning etc.
Of course, if there are improvements in the rental, you can go beyond the index as the property been "improved", but it's really handy to know each year that it's limited and the exact amount. For 2026 it's locked to 2.14% for example, for everyone.
Second, the historical database should be deleted. And if they can't survive that, so be it. Keeping the spoils of crime should be the crime. Justice still isn't finished.
Not clear to me that is the right approach, or if owning rentals should be more of a fixed income approach (or even speculative - profits only come from the sale of the property).
This actually works unless you inhibit the construction of new units. Naturally that's what we've been doing, which is why it isn't working. But the solution is to stop inhibiting the construction of new units.
Because the alternatives don't actually work. Unless you can build enough units to meet demand, there aren't enough units. Which means you either have high prices which suppress demand because people who can't afford them are forced out, or shortages because you're imposing some inadvisable price controls and then instead of being unable to get a unit because you can't afford the rent, you can't get a unit because they're all occupied and no one is adding more.
Alternatively we could keep the names private. A cryptographic solution would easily serve the need of authorities verifying the right person is in a place without identification, but good luck figuring out how to ensure the tenant has their keys somehow since in the US there are zero pieces of identification you can ensure every citizen has.
(Unless the other party to the contract deliberately asks you in the contract to keep it quiet. But that's something you need to actively agree to.)