REAL PAGE SUED

 DOJ Sues Large U.S. Landlords Over Alleged Price-Fixing — ProPublica

“While Americans across the country struggled to afford housing, the landlords named in today’s lawsuit shared sensitive information about rental prices and used algorithms to coordinate to keep the price of rent high,” said acting Assistant Attorney General Doha Mekki of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. The suit seeks to end “their practice of putting profits over people” and to make housing more affordable.

The legal action is the latest development to follow ProPublica’s initial investigation. Since 2022, senators have introduced legislation seeking to ban the use of rent algorithms similar to RealPage’s, and tenants have filed dozens of ongoing federal lawsuits. Cities around the country, including San Francisco, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, have also moved to bar landlords from using similar algorithms to set rents.

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Revenue management software can help landlords manage rents “efficiently” and avoid discrimination, said a spokesperson for defendant Cushman & Wakefield, which also owns defendant Pinnacle. The spokesperson said that as a manager only, the company does not “set strategy, pricing, or occupancy targets,” decide which software to use, or whether to accept any software’s recommendations.

The lawsuit also named as a defendant Blackstone’s LivCor. Blackstone did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In addition to naming landlords as defendants in the claim, it also added the attorneys general of Illinois and Massachusetts as co-plaintiffs, bringing the total number of participating states to 10. The states include the country’s most populous — California, which has 17 million renters.

RealPage said that “fewer than 10% of all rental housing units in the U.S. use RealPage software to suggest rental prices, and our software recommendations are accepted less than half the time.”

But a White House report in December said that number could be higher. It said RealPage and census data suggest that as many as 1 in 4 rentals nationwide use a RealPage pricing algorithm. And the company’s penetration is higher in some markets, it said.

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