Biden DOJ Sues RealPage for Algorithmic Rent Price-Fixing

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Aug. 23, 2024 that the Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against RealPage Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of 🌲North Carolina, alleging the company violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The lawsuit, joined by eight state attorneys general from North Carolina, 🌴California, 🏔️Colorado, 🦞Connecticut, 🦆Minnesota, 🌲Oregon, 🎸Tennessee, and 🌲Washington, charged RealPage with running an unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing and monopolizing the market for commercial revenue management software with approximately 80 percent market share.

The DOJ complaint alleged RealPage contracts with competing landlords who agree to share nonpublic, competitively sensitive information about apartment rental rates and lease terms to train and run RealPage's algorithmic pricing software. Deputy Attorney General LMLisa Monaco stated RealPage has found a modern way to violate a century-old law by feeding sensitive data into a sophisticated algorithm powered by artificial intelligence. The software includes an auto-accept setting allowing landlords to automatically adopt pricing suggestions, effectively permitting RealPage to determine the price renters pay.

On Jan. 7, 2025, the DOJ filed an amended complaint adding six of the nation's largest landlords: Greystar Real Estate Partners (managing approximately 950,000 units), Blackstone's LivCor, Camden Property Trust, Cushman & Wakefield's Pinnacle Property Management Services, Willow Bridge Property Company, and Cortland Management. Together these landlords operate more than 1.3 million rental units in 43 states and 🏛️Washington, D.C. The amended complaint alleged these landlords actively participated in coordinated pricing beyond just using RealPage's software, including direct communications between competing executives about pricing strategies and renewal rates.

On Aug. 8, 2025, the DOJ announced a proposed settlement with Greystar, the largest U.S. landlord managing nearly 950,000 rental units nationwide. The proposed consent decree requires Greystar to stop using any anticompetitive algorithm generating pricing recommendations using competitors' data, refrain from sharing competitively sensitive information with competitors, accept a court-appointed monitor if using third-party pricing algorithms, and cooperate with DOJ's monopolization claims against RealPage. A coalition of nine state attorneys general separately announced a $7 million settlement with Greystar in Nov. 2025.

On Nov. 24, 2025, the DOJ filed a proposed settlement with RealPage requiring the company to fundamentally redesign its algorithmic pricing software. The settlement prohibits RealPage from using nonpublic, competitively sensitive data from competing landlords when generating unit-level rent recommendations, restricts AI model training to data at least 12 months old and not associated with active leases, and prevents analysis of geographies narrower than state level. RealPage must remove features that limited price decreases or aligned pricing between competitors and accept a court-approved monitor with broad access to review code and model training documentation.

Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the Antitrust Division stated the modern machinery of algorithms and AI can be even more effective than the smoke-filled rooms of the past in facilitating illegal coordination. The lawsuit marked aggressive Biden administration enforcement targeting algorithmic collusion, treating software-enabled price coordination as equivalent to traditional cartel behavior under Sherman Act doctrine. The case established that sharing pricing data through algorithms constitutes illegal information exchange even without explicit human agreements to fix prices.

The proposed RealPage settlement, if approved, would remain in effect for seven years from its entry date, with possible early termination after four years if DOJ deems oversight unnecessary. The settlement requires RealPage to stop hosting meetings where competing landlords discuss pricing strategies using nonpublic data and refrain from conducting market surveys gathering nonpublic competitive intelligence for pricing purposes. These terms aim to dismantle the infrastructure enabling algorithmic coordination while allowing legitimate revenue management software that does not share competitor data.

The DOJ lawsuit followed ProPublica's Oct. 2022 investigation by reporter HVHeather Vogell and data analyst Haru Coryne, which exposed how RealPage's YieldStar software enabled landlords to coordinate rent increases through shared pricing data. In one Seattle neighborhood, ProPublica found 70 percent of apartments were managed by landlords using RealPage software. RealPage's own marketing claimed its algorithm helped clients outperform the market 3 percent to 7 percent. Within two years of ProPublica's reporting, federal prosecutors built an antitrust case leading to settlement terms fundamentally restricting how algorithmic pricing software can operate in rental markets.