RealPage landlords pay nearly $360M to renters over algorithmic pricing
A federal judge in Nashville approved settlements totaling close to $360 million in the RealPage antitrust litigation, resolving claims that the software let landlords collude to push rents above free-market levels. Covered renters paid between October 2018 and November 2025 at properties using RealPage tools like YieldStar and AI Revenue Management. The companies admitted no fault but agreed to stop feeding competitors' nonpublic data into pricing models. State attorneys general opposed the deals, and further litigation continues.
The federal settlement is what it is, but it's not the final word necessarily.
- rabidheuristics
“None of the companies admitted fault or liability. They did, however, agree to stop providing Realpage with their nonpublic data for use as an input in Realpage’s revenue management system’s price recommendations, and to stop using Realpage’s RMS in ways that use competitors’ non-public data to inform pricing recommendations”.
Okay but Realpage has a decade of real pricing data that it can use to continue informing these rental companies and outside of them having extremely hard boundaries in their service this is just going to happen again.
This doesn’t do a whole lot to address the actual issue, and these companies aren’t going to stop colluding over a wrist slap like this.
- epistasis
We need a public rental registry of rental prices that anybody can browse, analyze, etc. The information disparity is a problem.
However, that's not a systematic method for lower prices. It just prevents individual cases of price gouging.
- Lucasoato
What about a law that bans house ownership and rentals unless you are a physical person and not a company? What would be the cons of such a thing?
- exabrial
_thats it_ ???
- skew-aberration
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Land ownership is the biggest business and the source of the biggest conspiracies.
- throwitaway222
I've been saying this for a while, but there is a cottage industry like RealPage in pretty much every industry. These companies need to be slammed out of existence for anti-competitive pricing and collusion. So much corruption. I'm so sick of fraud and corruption.
- mmooss
I wonder what empirical and theoretical substance there is to the idea that the cost of living is due to lack of competition (in zero-to-one markets), and that competition is the solution to much of this.
On that basis, the 'free market' should be called the 'free, competitive market' - without competition, it has little value. Businesses should be required to compete and to opeerate in competitive markets. Anything anti-competitive should be treated harshly.
- aetherspawn
Yep sue propertyme next