RealPage Rent-Fixing Settlements Pass $200M

More landlords are inking settlements in the RealPage rent-fixing litigation.

The settlement agreements of 11 landlords were recently disclosed in filings connected to a class-action case in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, Bisnow reported. The settlement agreements of those defendants add up to more than $218 million.

Several of the settlements referenced in the filings had already been publicly disclosed: Equity Residential agreed to pay $56 million, while Camden Property Trust and Mid-America Communities each agreed to pony up $53 million.

Other prominent landlords to reach settlement agreements include Cortland Management ($18 million), Lincoln Property Company ($12 million), Related Companies ($5 million) and Trammell Crow Residential/Crow Holdings ($2.1 million).

All of the settlement agreements involve the elimination of nonpublic rental information from databases allegedly used by RealPage software. The firms will not be allowed to use the software to help set rental prices. All of the firms also denied liability.

More than two dozen landlords and property managers agreed in October to a preliminary $141 million settlement in the class-action lawsuit, which alleged a rent-fixing scheme. Greystar contributed the largest portion of that settlement at $50 million, while other firms like BH Management, Brookfield and Pinnacle Property Management Services sought to settle.

Litigation against RealPage launched after a 2022 ProPublica article that detailed how its YieldStar software — which has since been rebranded to AI Revenue Management — could inflate rents and suppress competition across the country based on its algorithm.

The Department of Justice filed its own suit, raising industrywide questions about whether sharing aggregated, anonymized rent data, as is central in RealPage’s software, could be construed as collusion.

In November, RealPage reached a settlement with the DOJ, absolving the company of financial penalties and admissions of wrongdoing, dependent on the company committing to platform changes and agreeing to independent oversight.

— Holden Walter-Warner