What Does All the Justice Department Sleaze Mean for Your Rental Housing Costs? 

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According to the mega corporate law firm Hogan Lovell, on the issue of antitrust—including price-sharing software among landlords— the administration is trying “novel approaches” on an “unpredictable path.”

That’s one way of putting it. Another would be that it’s heavy on the sleaze. Officials shown the door are alleging that bribes determine the justice department’s priorities, and Trump is unwinding the few actions the previous administration took that actually helped the working class in the US. One of those was the closure of a price-fixing loophole, the usage of which took off in recent years in the rental housing market. Its enforcement is now in doubt.

Let’s briefly rewind before getting into the details of the current corruption at the DOJ and what that could mean for the rental housing market.

Biden’s One Good Deed 

One of the great puzzles of the Biden administration was how it was so awful on just about everything while simultaneously empowering the Federal Trade Commission and DOJ Antitrust Division to—for  the first time in decades—challenge the plutocrats’ project to cement serfdom in the 21st century.

Biden’s 2021 executive order, Promoting Competition in the American Economy, targeted excessive market concentration and anticompetitive practices as a major culprit behind declining wages, higher consumer prices, growing inequality, and more.

Most importantly, rather than just describing the problem, the DOJ and FTC were empowered to actually enforce the Sherman Act, Clayton Act, Federal Trade Commission Act, and sector-specific competition statutes.

And they did.

Perhaps one of the more important acts was the closing of a price-fixing loophole from the days when the Clintons ran the White House and was big enough to drive a truck through.

The Clinton DOJ declared that it would allow so-called information sharing in the healthcare industry back in 1993. The rule provided wiggle room around the Sherman Antitrust Act, which “sets forth the basic antitrust prohibition against contracts, combinations, and conspiracies in restraint of trade or commerce.”

And it wasn’t just in healthcare. The rules were interpreted to apply to all industries. And so companies increasingly turned to data firms offering software that “exchanges information” at lightning speed with competitors in order to keep wages low and prices high – effectively creating hidden national cartels even if there wasn’t concentration on the surface.

The posterboy of such practices is RealPage, a private equity-owned company that operates as the middle man in a national property management cartel that has helped send rent prices through the roof—particularly in markets with a high concentration of Wall Street-owned property managers who are the most eager adopters of the software. Lawsuits accuses RealPage of using the tech it sells to real estate management companies to orchestrate an illegal price-fixing scheme, which all but eliminates competition among mega landlords, allows them to boost prices, and acted as a major factor in skyrocketing rents in recent years that have also exacerbated the exceptional US homelessness crisis.

In addition to class action lawsuits, RealPage and the management companies using its software, also face a DOJ-led civil antitrust suit (In December, the DOJ closed its criminal investigation into price-fixing practices.) The DOJ guidance and the cases against RealPage and rental giants hit the brakes on information sharing across industries, but companies are currently in wait-and-see mode.

DOJ in Disarray 

While the Trump administration rescinded Biden’s executive order promoting competition, it has not yet changed guidance on the information-sharing “safe harbors” and the case against RealPage remains open.

Does the administration plan on continuing to go after such information sharing or does it plan to profit off of the threat of enforcement?

As far as above-board monopolies go, it looks like the latter. An August Wall Street Journal piece describes how companies are able to trade splashy investment commitments for antitrust get out of jail cards. One recent example:

Working through Mike Davis—a longtime Trump ally—and other consultants, Hewlett Packard Enterprise made commitments, not disclosed in court papers, that called for the company to create new jobs at a facility in the U.S., according to people familiar with the matter. The unusual offer was designed to ease the government’s opposition to the company’s merger with a major rival, Juniper Networks, which would reduce competition in the wireless networking market.

The proposed settlement with the Justice Department allowed HPE to acquire Juniper in a deal that closed last month.

And US Attorney General and corporate lobbyist and foreclosure fraudster Pam Bondi is now leading a house cleaning operation at the Justice Department, getting rid of or sidelining career supervisors who were responsible for going after corruption, price fixing, securities fraud, and antitrust.

Gail Slater, the department’s top antitrust enforcer, has pushed back on the infusion of lobbyists into her world, but appears under siege by Trump loyalists inside and outside of the administration. Slater, who was picked by Trump for the role, saw her two top deputies fired last week after they challenged the terms of the favorable settlement that HPE negotiated with officials in Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office.

Slater and the two fired deputies had objected to HPE’s use of Davis and other politically connected lawyers to negotiate the settlement, people familiar with the matter said. Those comments got back to Davis and others, prompting them to complain about her leadership. Senior officials including Chad Mizelle, Bondi’s chief of staff, and Stanley Woodward, who is nominated to be the associate attorney general, are likely to play a bigger role in overseeing Slater’s division moving forward, some of the people said. 

Well, it won’t be Mizelle, who recently got axed—potentially to protect the administration from any HPE sleaze fallout.

Roger Alford, the former No. 2 official in the division and one of those shown the door, recently described the internal dynamic as a struggle “between genuine MAGA reformers and MAGA-in-Name-Only lobbyists” and added the following:

“The Department of Justice is now overwhelmed with lobbyists with little antitrust expertise going above the Antitrust Division leadership seeking special favors with warm hugs.”

Companies facing antitrust investigations, like RealPage private equity owner Thoma Bravo, are now paying up for lobbyists close to Trump and seeing if they can get deals that will allow them to continue breaking the law.

Under such a setup it would be understandable if the Trump administration doesn’t re-open information sharing safe harbors, but only allows it on a case-by-case basis for companies that pay the right price.

On the other hand, some observers believe the DOJ seems less concerned about algorithmic pricing schemes and more focused on finding ways to cash in on large-scale mergers.

Just a friendly reminder of what it means if the DOJ shrugs over such schemes: last year, the White House Council of Economic Advisers estimated that RealPage’s system resulted in renters across the country paying an extra $3.8 billion in 2023 alone. Those extra costs come during an affordable housing and homelessness crisis as there is a bipartisan push across the country criminalizing homelessness, and the Trump administration is now preparing to dramatically scale back federal housing assistance.

New Guidance Coming Soon? 

While Trump and members of his administration like to speak the language of antitrust, they have a funny idea on what causes concentration. To their minds, government regulation is the culprit.

Consider Trump’s April executive order, Reducing Anti-Competitive Regulatory Barriers. While it decries “the creation of, de facto or de jure monopolies,” it argues that “anti-competitive regulations” are behind the problem. They “impose anti-competitive restraints or distortions on the operation of the free market.”

Following President Trump’s August decision to revoke Biden-era antitrust provisions, the DOJ issued a press release in support, stating that “[we] are unleashing the new American Golden Age through antitrust enforcement that removes barriers to innovation and opportunity and limits regulatory burdens on free competition.”

One can get whiplash reading these statements. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson praised Trump’s revocation of the Biden order, saying that the Trump administration will be “enforcing the antitrust laws passed by Congress, for the benefit of all American consumers and workers.”

How so? The magical market, now free from the government’s efforts to “pick winners and losers,” will regulate itself, according to Ferguson. He adds that it’s time to leave the “top-down” regulatory approach in the rearview mirror. Will a bottom approach be replacing it? It doesn’t look like it.

This is simply free market ideology wrapped in the MAGA cloak of antitrust.  Trump’s April executive order asked the FTC and DOJ Antitrust to deliver a list of all anti-monopoly regulations that create monopolies. Those were recently submitted, and as Trump looks to goose the stock market, one can expect a vast number of “anticompetitive regulations” to be rescinded or substantially modified.

The more than 125 recommendations were not publicly disclosed (aside from a few red-meat cases like Department of Transportation contract preferences for socially disadvantaged individuals). Will enforcement on information sharing be among those deemed anti-competitive?

The status of that price-fixing loophole, as well as the federal case against RealPage, will erase any remaining doubt about the true intentions of the administration’s anti-trust policy.

Data Sharing Promotion

Shortly after the Google decision came down Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater (who is considered one of the good ones—or at least not as bad as some of the other crazies running around Justice— on antitrust) delivered the keynote at the Fordham Competition Law Institute’s 52nd annual conference on international antitrust law and policy. Some of her comments dealt directly with information sharing. Here she is championing the Google decision that allowed its monopoly to stay intact:

…the court imposed data remedies that require Google to provide qualified competitors access to its data and syndication of its search results, so that Google cannot continue to singularly exploit the data advantage…The data that is shared will give competitors — including emerging AI companies — a leg up to overcome the data gap and compete on a more even playing ground.

Now, there are questions over the accuracy of that statement with many believing it will not make much of a difference. As Matt Stoller noted, Maybe it will help some generative AI firms who have access to the capital markets.

Importantly, Slater indicates that this data-sharing requirement from the Google case should be applied to other industries:

…there is every indication that these dynamics will play out in a much bigger way with AI. The prospect of GenAI expands the competitive utility of data across every industry. Think about data on crop yields and local weather enabling more effective agriculture, or health data enabling more effective approaches in insurance. Now every industry is a data industry. As many have observed, data is the new oil. It fuels the engine of progress in every sector of the economy.

Yet noticeably absent from Slater’s comments are effects of such data collection on the consumer and whether it should be collected at all—let alone shared among industry players? Should stolen AI training data be shared?

If we use RealPage and the rental market as a test case, how about data like the following?

“For underwriting tenants who want to split their rent into installments over the month, Livble uses Plaid’s open banking data.”

Plaid offers an app for people to have more control over their financial data. Really its to facilitate consent to share banking data with 3d parties? pic.twitter.com/FJJWVE0GJz

— Lee Hepner (@LeeHepner) July 28, 2025

How does having RealPage share that data with behemoth landlords fuel the engine of progress?

Or how about what 404 Media just reported on—how some  landlords are using a service that logs into a potential renter’s employer systems and scrapes their paystubs and other information en masse? Would sharing that data also rev up the progress engine?

Slater in her speech further contrasted the “sledgehammer of regulation” with the “scalpel of antitrust.” Her argument is that targeted enforcement works while “premature regulation” can entrench incumbents who can afford compliance. I think what she means to say is that the entrenched can pay the cost-of-doing-business lawbreaking.

And so is the argument that by allowing illegal information sharing among smaller players, they can compete with the illegal monopolies?

To my mind, this sounds like a new twist on the logic unveiled by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton back in 1993 when she joined justice department and FTC officials to announce the creation of antitrust safety zones. They said it was going to “make health care more available and affordable to all Americans.”

It didn’t. And so when Slater talks about fueling “the engine of progress” the obvious question is progress for whom?

Here’s the previous Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Doha Mekki of the Antitrust Division with on fairly obvious answer:

An overly formalistic approach to information exchange risks permitting – or even endorsing – frameworks that may lead to higher prices, suppressed wages, or stifled innovation.