Yardi Systems, another US property management company, is also facing a class action lawsuit for antitrust violations for artificially inflating rental prices. The company has said it did so “nothing illegal”, as it does not impose rental prices through its software or make “collusive pricing decisions.”
Typical rental costs in Phoenix rose by more than $500 per month from April 2020 through 2024, and by about $400 in Washington, D.C., over the same period, according to Zillow.
Tenants have also filed numerous class action lawsuits against RealPage and property owners that have been consolidated. Some landlords named in those lawsuits established claims earlier this year. The court dismissed a lawsuit over price fixing for student housing, but said the tenants’ class action lawsuit You can go aheadAttorneys representing some of the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit did not respond to requests for comment.
RealPage laid off about 4 percent of its staff in June. “RealPage is very focused on innovation and accelerating the growth of its business in 2024 and beyond, and as a result has made the decision to eliminate a small number of positions within the company,” said Jennifer Bowcock, a company spokeswoman. The layoffs were not related to the antitrust lawsuit, she said. Thoma Bravo, RealPage’s owner, did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
As of 2020, RealPage saying I was collecting data on about 16 million rental units across the United States. 44 million In the United States, there are nearly 22 million rental households and for-profit companies own nearly 22 million rental units. RealPage grew when it acquired Lease Rent Options (LRO) in 2017, after overcoming antitrust scrutiny from the Department of Justice. The Justice Department did not comment on WIRED’s questions about its purported investigation into RealPage or its approval of RealPage’s acquisition of Lease Rent Options in 2017.
Asked about the latest developments in the investigation, RealPage referred to a portion of its recent, lengthy statement, which said: “The Department of Justice thoroughly reviewed LRO and YieldStar in 2017, without objecting to, let alone questioning, any features of the products.” RealPage also says its “products are fundamentally the same today” as they were when the acquisition was approved.
In June, The New York Times U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, the Justice Department’s top antitrust official, asked him if he would consider an AI tool communicating pricing information to be the same as collusion between humans, and the question referenced the RealPage investigation. Kanter responded: “I often say that if your dog bites someone, you are responsible for your dog biting someone. If your AI sets the prices, you are equally responsible.”
The Justice Department also filed a motion last year Declaration of interest In the combined RealPage class action, the case could become a precedent in algorithmic pricing. The statement reflected Kanter’s argument that the method of pricing doesn’t matter and that algorithms are just the latest evolution in information gathering and sharing.
“In-person handshakes gave way to the telephone and fax, and later to email. Algorithms are the new frontier,” the Justice Department argued in a statement of interest it filed in the class action lawsuit against RealPage and the owners. “And, given the amount of information an algorithm can access and digest, this new frontier poses an even greater anticompetitive threat than the last.”
