DOJ accuses real estate software company of helping landlords collude to raise rents
Summary
The Justice Department alleges that RealPage’s algorithmic pricing lets landlords of multifamily dwellings effectively collude and set rents above market rate, which "deprives renters of the benefits of competition on apartment leasing terms and harms millions of Americans.” “Americans should not have to pay more in rent because a company has found a new way to scheme with landlords to break the law,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. Garland noted the lawsuit was brought under the Sherman Antitrust Act, a law passed more than a century ago when “an anticompetitive scheme might have looked like robber barons shaking hands at a secret meeting.” Landlords colluding through mathematical algorithms may be new, he said, but it violates the same bedrock principle of a free market fostering competition. “Landlords are encouraged to configure the product to automatically accept the RealPage recommendations,” says Eric Dunn, a tenants rights lawyer with the National Housing Law Project. In a recent and somewhat related case, hotels in Las Vegas were accused of sharing information via different pricing software and using it to artificially inflate room rates. “AI is helping not just profit-seeking landlords, but operators and developers of affordable housing,” Vidur Gupta, CEO of Beekin, said in a statement responding to the suit.