U.S. landlords who use RealPage products to set prices on rental apartments are facing accusations of collusion.
  • A group of lawsuits accuse large landlords of price-fixing the market rate of rent in the United States
  • A complaint filed by Washington D.C.’s Attorney General alleges 14 landlords in the district are sharing competitively sensitive data through RealPage, a real estate software provider
  • RealPage recommends prices for roughly 4.5 million housing units in the United States
  • RealPage told CNBC that its landlord customers are under no obligation to take their price suggestions

A group of renters in the U.S. say their landlords are using software to deliver inflated rent hikes.

“We’ve been told as tenants by employees of Equity that the software takes empathy out of the equation. So they can charge whatever the software tells them to charge,” said Kevin Weller, a tenant at Portside Towers since 2021.

Tenants say the management started to increase prices substantially after giving renters concessions during the Covid-19 pandemic.

  • yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.mlEnglish
    31·
    9 months ago

    Well, if this isn’t a classic case of “he said, she said.”

    From the article:

    “Rather than making independent decisions on what the market here in D.C. calls for in terms of filling vacant units, landlords are compelled, under the terms of their agreement with RealPage, to charge what RealPage tells them,” said [Attorney General of the District of Columbia Brian Schwalb].

    Also:

    RealPage told CNBC that its landlord customers are under no obligation to take their price suggestions.

    So, which one is it?

    Regardless, these are some very interesting cases revolving around the Sherman Act as it applies to housing markets.

    EDIT: Here’s the video version of the article.

    • brianorca@lemmy.world
      2·
      9 months ago

      Of course they are free to set their own price, but when the system tells them they should charge a higher price “due to market conditions” of course they take the easy way out instead of actually researching the market. So it’s both, but mostly the first because they are lazy.