On Tuesday, January 7th, the Department of Justice (DOJ) added six of the country’s largest landlords in a lawsuit, originally filed against Real Page (Property Management Software Company), alleging they too assist Real Page in a price algorithm scheme to raise rent prices.
The list of property management companies that are listed in the lawsuit is as follows: 1) Greystar Real Estate Partners LLC (Greystar); 2) Blackstone’s LivCor LLC (LivCor); 3) Camden Property Trust (Camden); 4) Cushman & Wakefield Inc. and Pinnacle Property Management Services LLC (Cushman); 5) Willow Bridge Property Company LLC (Willow Bridge); and 6) Cortland Management LLC (Cortland).
The lawsuit was originally filed against Real Page in August 2024 through the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina in Greensboro, NC.
The lawsuit which includes Department of Justice and 8 states (North Carolina, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington) as the plaintiff, accusing the Texas-based property management software maker of illegally price-fixing the rent price to reduce competition among other landlords in favor of the six property management companies to gain profit.
Together, these property management companies operate over 1.3 million units in 43 states and in Washington, DC., according to the Justice Department. The companies would share the rent prices among other competitions with Real Page. Real Page would then use the information the landlords shared with them, to raise the rent price in the rent algorithm scheme.
DOJ did a two-year investigation looking into the scheme after a story was published in 2022 by ProPublica titled, “Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why.”
Since 2022, senators have introduced legislation to ban rent algorithms similar to RealPage’s, and tenants have filed dozens of federal lawsuits.
“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,”
- Acting Assistant Attorney General, Doha Mekki, of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division stated.
Cities, such as San Francisco and Minneapolis, have also moved to ban landlords from using similar algorithms to set rents.