By: Hannah Gracedel

It’s that time of year again. You come home from a long day of work to a little note taped to your apartment door. You open it, and it’s a lease renewal notice. Surprise! Your rent is going up. Again. You start browsing online for alternatives, but everything is too expensive. You wonder if this is just inflation or if something else is behind these relentless rent prices. A few internet search results later, you stumble upon the name of a company you’ve never heard of, RealPage, which is currently being accused of price fixing in the rental market. 

Who is RealPage?

RealPage is a property management software company headquartered in Richardson, Texas. Its software helps property managers and owners with marketing, applicant screening, utility management, resident services, lead generation, and, most importantly, recommendations for pricing of rental units. RealPage has been the nation’s dominant provider of such rent-setting software since 2017. 

How the rent-setting software works

RealPage’s pricing tool pulls data from its vast network of clients to recommend rent prices for individual units. The software factors in data such as supply and demand, occupancy rates, competitor pricing, etc. The software updates in real-time, providing property managers with insight they would have been unable to obtain on their own through public information. 

What is Price Fixing?

In a healthy, competitive market, prices are generally determined by supply and demand, where sellers respond to consumers’ willingness to buy goods and services. Price fixing, however, sidesteps this process. Price fixing occurs when competitors agree with each other, either formally or informally, to raise, lower, stabilize, or maintain prices at a certain level rather than letting the market set them naturally. This type of coordination among competitors eliminates the incentive to undercut rivals by offering a better deal. The effect of this is artificially higher prices for consumers. 

Normally, when we think of a price-fixing cartel, we think of shady business executives meeting in a back room, discussing their private business information, and agreeing on prices moving forward. One infamous example is the Lysine price-fixing cartel caught on camera, which was the basis for the bestselling nonfiction thriller book Informant: A True Story, and the movie adaptation Informant!, starring Matt Damon. 

However, RealPage’s situation is different and, admittedly, makes for a much less thrilling movie adaptation. What’s happening here is that the price-fixing agreement is happening virtually and among competitors who have never even spoken with each other before. By feeding private data into RealPage’s software and accepting its rent recommendations, landlords and property managers may be coordinating prices through a shared algorithm, effectively using it as an intermediary for collusion. While the method of alleged price fixing is novel, the impact on the market is just the same: higher prices and fewer meaningful options for consumers. As Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco put it, “[t]raining a machine to break the law is still breaking the law.”

Why is this such a big deal?

Currently, RealPage serves over 24 million units worldwide. This means that rent prices across millions of units are being shaped not just by local market forces, but by a centralized algorithm feeding on private data submitted from property owners and managers who are technically supposed to be competitors. When large numbers of sellers use the same system to set rents, it raises serious concerns that competition is being replaced by coordination. 

Take Seattle, for example. In Belltown, a Seattle neighborhood located between the Space Needle and Pike Place Market, 70% of the apartments were overseen by just 10 property managers, and every single one of them uses pricing software sold by RealPage. To the unsuspecting renter, this might look like a competitive market with multiple landlords, but in reality, it’s one algorithm making the rent decisions for the thousands of the units in a neighborhood. 

Pending claims against RealPage

The U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of states, including North Carolina, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, and Tennessee, have filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against RealPage. The DOJ alleges that RealPage’s pricing algorithm enabled landlords to share confidential information and align their rents, thereby violating antitrust laws.

The Washington State Attorney General’s Office filed a lawsuit in April 2025 against RealPage and nine major landlords, alleging violations of the state’s Consumer Protection Act. The lawsuit claims that RealPage’s software facilitated a conspiracy among landlords to inflate rental prices, affecting approximately 800,000 leases in Washington between 2017 and 2024.

If these claims succeed, the implications could be massive, not just for RealPage but for the future of algorithmic pricing across industries.

#rent #algorithm #wjlta