Abigail Slater, Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice | Official Website
The U.S. Department of Justice announced a proposed settlement with RealPage Inc., a company that provides revenue management software for the multifamily rental housing industry. The settlement aims to address concerns about anticompetitive practices, including algorithmic coordination and information sharing among landlords, which the government alleges have affected rental pricing in markets across the country.
According to the Justice Department’s complaint, RealPage’s software used nonpublic, competitively sensitive information from landlords to set rental prices. The software also included features that limited price decreases and aligned pricing among competitors. Additionally, RealPage hosted meetings where competing property management companies shared sensitive information.
“Competing companies must make independent pricing decisions, and with the rise of algorithmic and artificial intelligence tools, we will remain at the forefront of vigorous antitrust enforcement,” said Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.
If approved by the court, the consent judgment would require RealPage to stop using competitors’ nonpublic data in its software for setting rental prices during runtime operations. It would also restrict model training to historic data aged at least 12 months and prohibit models from determining geographic effects narrower than at a state level. Features designed to limit price decreases or align pricing between users would need to be removed or redesigned. The company would also be required to stop conducting market surveys for sensitive information and refrain from discussing market analyses based on nonpublic data in relevant meetings.
The settlement further mandates that RealPage accept oversight by a court-appointed monitor and cooperate with ongoing litigation against property management companies that have used its software.
The proposed agreement will be published in the Federal Register as required by law. Members of the public may submit written comments within 60 days after publication before final approval is considered by the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.
RealPage is headquartered in Richardson, Texas.
