It might have gotten lost amid the daily onslaught of whiplash news, but on Thursday, the nation’s largest landlord, Greystar, reached a $7 million settlement with nine states that sued the property management giant for fixing rental prices. Greystar and other mega landlords used common software offered by the Texas-based, private equity-owned company RealPage in order to align their rent increases.
The $7 million figure is not a typo. To put that number into perspective, here’s some background on the company:
Greystar is a leading, fully integrated global real estate platform offering expertise in property management, investment management, development, and construction services in institutional-quality rental housing. Headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, Greystar manages and operates over $300 billion of real estate in nearly 250 markets globally with offices throughout North America, Europe, South America, and the Asia-Pacific region. Greystar is the largest operator of apartments in the United States, managing over 1,000,000 units/beds globally. Across its platforms, Greystar has over $79 billion of assets under management, including over $35 billion of development assets and over $30 billion of regulatory assets under management.
As a private company, Greystar doesn’t report earnings, but the $7 million comes out to a whopping 0.002% of the $300 billion worth of real estate managed by the company. Even if we include the $50 million it agreed to pay last month to settle a class-action lawsuit over its price-fixing software, we’re still well under one percent.
Still Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta had the gall to champion the $7 million deal:
“Whether it’s through smoke-filled backroom deals or through an algorithm on your computer screen, colluding to drive up prices is illegal. Families across the country are staring down an affordability crisis. Companies that intentionally fuel this unaffordability by raising prices to line their own pockets can be sure I will use the full force of my office to hold them accountable.”
The companies are no doubt shaking in their boots, Rob.
To be fair, as part of the settlement, Greystar did also agree to “limits” in its use of software that relies on other landlords’ confidential data to set rents, but it’s unclear exactly how strict these limits will be. Back in August, Greystar reached a settlement with the Department of Justice in which it did not admit any wrongdoing nor pay even a token fine. There was also an interesting caveat to its restrictions on using price-fixing software. From Mintz:
Importantly, the Final Judgment does not prohibit Greystar’s use of algorithmic pricing but rather sets conditions Greystar must meet and certify prior to that use – in some cases. For example, if Greystar uses a RealPage revenue management product after the court enters a final judgement in the RealPage case, no certification is required.
The Greystar agreement with the states, while specifically forbidding the company from colluding with other landlords for the time being, also includes future wiggle room. The proposed settlement states the following:
Greystar may license or use a Revenue Management Product in a Settling State that complies with the terms of an agreed Final Judgment between the United States and RealPage in United States et al. v. RealPage et al.
That refers to the federal case that remains open against RealPage, which means the states are effectively kicking the decision over to the Trump DOJ. Some believe that the cushy Justice settlements with mega landlords like Greystar and Cortland, which include cooperation in the case against RealPage, mean the book is going to get thrown at the latter. Color me skeptical. It’s more likely these are just the opening sweeps of the whole crime spree under the rug.
An important WSJ story from Aug. 6, “MAGA Antitrust Agenda Under Siege by Lobbyists Close to Trump,” describes how big money is buying get out of jail cards on antitrust violations. Here’s the segment that applies to RealPage:
Other companies facing antitrust investigations are now looking to hire lawyers or lobbyists close to Trump after witnessing the favorable settlement that HPE reached, according to several defense lawyers who regularly represent merging companies before the Justice Department.
…Thoma Bravo, a private-equity manager that owns a company facing several antitrust lawsuits, also hired [Brian Ballard—a longtime Trump backer, who raised $50 million for his 2024 election] in March to lobby on competition issues related to the real-estate market, according to filings. The department last year sued Real Page, a Thoma Bravo portfolio company, alleging that RealPage’s rent-setting software allowed apartment landlords to illegally coordinate price increases.
So with the states’ settlement placing the onus on the feds, should the Trump administration sleaze pave the way, Greystar and friends could be right back at it in no time.
For the time being, Greystar can simply keep being Greystar—without the price fixing.
2/ That made the news. Greystar’s thousands of other tenants deal with something that never does: They’re nickel and dimed with junk fees:
$4 for no cockroaches
$20 to start paying rent
$5 to charge you rent monthly
$8 to pay online
$25 for “valet trash” pic.twitter.com/zwI3Xsnrja
— Alvaro Bedoya (@BedoyaUSA) September 15, 2025
It’s also important to note that the settlement with the nine states only applies to those states—not elsewhere where Greystar might be fixing prices. It also does nothing about the fact that the company still has more than 900,000 units—up from 794,000 just a few years ago—nationwide, including roughly 100,000 student beds under management, which by itself gives Greystar enormous influence in rental markets.
But don’t worry, the California Attorney General assures us that the $7 million is a win for the people. In reality, rather than “hold[ing] them accountable,” what Bonta and other attorney generals (in this case, from Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon and Tennessee) are effectively telling companies is that they can break the law for nearly a decade, destroy people’s lives, make tons of money, and then pay a miniscule fee to make it all go away. In other words, it’s just another day in America’s two-tiered justice system.
Let’s review what Greystar is going to pay some couch change for.
The Crime
Greystar was one of many behemoth rental management companies that used software from RealPage—a private equity-owned corporation that created programs for property management to share confidential price and vacancy data with one another in order to send rent prices through the roof. [1]
Many of the rental markets dominated by large landlords using price fixing software saw astronomical growth in rental prices in recent years—particularly post-2016 when Realpage acquired its main rival and was able to hit “critical mass” in a number of markets. That acquisition was also followed by a rising number of evictions and spikes in homelessness. The lawsuits against RealPage and the rental management companies contend that its software covers at least 16 million units across the US, and private equity-owned property management companies are the most enthusiastic adopters of the RealPage technology. A separate lawsuit filed in 2023 targets Yardi Systems and property management companies using its price-setting software to collude on at least another eight million units.
RealPage officials have bragged about the outsized effect their software has on rental market prices. Company executive Andrew Bowen once said that the software was “driving it,” referring to rental price increases. He added: “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”
One of the lawsuits alleges that following guidance from RealPage, large rental management companies like Greystar were sometimes intentionally leaving units vacant during a homelessness crisis:
RealPage allows participating Lessors to coordinate supply levels to avoid price competition. In a competitive market, there are periods where supply exceeds demand, and that in turn puts downward pressure on market prices as firms compete to attract lessees. To avoid the consequences of lawful competition, RealPage provides Lessors with information sufficient to “stagger” lease renewals to avoid oversupply. Lessors thus held vacant rental units unoccupied for periods of time (rejecting the historical adage to keep the “heads in the beds”) to ensure that, collectively, there is not one period in which the market faces an oversupply of residential real estate properties for lease, keeping prices higher.
Here’s former RealPage CEO Steve Winn commenting on the counterintuitive strategy:
‘During an earnings call in 2017, Winn said one large property company, which managed more than 40,000 units, learned it could make more profit by operating at a lower occupancy level that “would have made management uncomfortable before,” he said.
The company had been seeking occupancy levels of 97% or 98% in markets where it was a leader, Winn said. But when it began using YieldStar, managers saw that raising rents and leaving some apartments vacant made more money.’
The Victims
In the cities where Realpage-using Wall Street landlords dominate the market, we’ve seen the number of homeless and deaths of unhoused people increase rapidly. Correlation is not causation but…
- Homeless numbers and deaths are up dramatically in areas where Wall Street landlords are particularly active and have turned to collusion software.
- That drives up rents and creates artificial scarcity.
- Among the biggest reasons cited for homelessness is the lack of affordable housing.
It’s important to stress just how much market power a collection of Wall Street landlords using common price-setting software have over certain markets. In cities like Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Nashville, Dallas, Atlanta, etc. the market can be dominated by large companies, and if all of them are colluding, the effect can be enormous.
We can use the example of Los Angeles, where Greystar owns numerous properties, and which also happens to be the epicenter of the country’s homelessness crisis.
Los Angeles County is the 6th largest multifamily market with 448,848 completed units. Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, an LA organization that focuses on tenant rights and economic justice, in their 2021 report, “Beyond Wall Street Landlords: How Private Equity in the Rental Market Harms Tenants,” found that more than two thirds of all LA Rentals are now owned by speculative investment vehicles.
Corporate landlords named in the RealPage lawsuits include Essex Property Trust, Equity Residential, and AvalonBay Communities — the three biggest players in LA real estate management.
Combined they control 35,020 multifamily units, or 7.8 percent of LA County’s 448,848 units.
According to lawsuits against RealPage and large property management companies, there are another 17 companies that use RealPage’s rent-setting tool in LA, and together, they account for just more than 52 percent of all rental apartment buildings in the LA market. [1]
A separate lawsuit against Santa Barbara-based Yardi, a company similar to RealPage, accuses it of using its RENTmaximizer (now Revenue IQ) product to do exactly what RealPage is accused of doing.
When you throw Yardi into the mix, that means that roughly 79 percent of all multifamily rental units in LA County are being listed using collusion software. And rents rose 41 percent from 2016 — the year when RealPage hit “critical mass”— to 2024.
At the same time, a 2021 report by Strategic Actions for a Just Economy shows that the same mega landlords using collusion software are the main culprits behind more frequent use of the Ellis Act to mass evict tenants.
What do price fixing, increased vacancy, and mass evictions lead to?
A 2022 study from The Guardian and the University of Washington found that across 73 US cities and counties there were at least 18,000 deaths of people experiencing homelessness over the 2016 to 2020 time period with the number increasing 77 percent over that five-year period. (The federal government makes no effort to count the number of homeless deaths, and many believe the number to be much higher.)
Meanwhile, CEOs brag about using RealPage and evicting people:
The CEO of Defendant Lessor Camden, Ric Campo, has touted that the net effect of raising rents and “pushing people out” of the residential real estate leases they could no longer afford, was “$10 million in income.”
The timeframe for that income Campo is describing isn’t clear (a month? a quarter?), but what is clear: it’s more than the fine the nation’s largest landlord just paid to nine states for its social murder crimes.
Notes
[1] Other real estate goliaths named in the lawsuits who were using RealPage software to allegedly collude and keep rents artificially high include the following:
- Trammell Crow Company, headquartered in Dallas, is a subsidiary of CBRE Group, the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm.
- Lincoln Property Co. Manages or leases over 403 million square feet across the US.
- FPI Management. Currently manages just over 155,000 units in 18 states.
- Avenue5 manages $22 billion in multifamily and single-family assets nationwide.
- Equity Residential, the 5th largest owner of apartments in the United States, primarily in Southern California, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York City, Boston, Seattle, Denver, Atlanta, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and Austin.
- Mid-America Apartment Communities, which as of June 30, 2022, owns or has ownership interest in 101,229 homes in 16 states throughout the Southeast, Southwest, and Mid-Atlantic regions.
- Essex Property Trust (62,000 units). This fully integrated real estate investment trust (REIT) acquires, develops, redevelops, and manages multifamily apartment communities located in supply-constrained markets on the west coast.
- Thrive Community Management (18,700 units in Washington and Oregon).
- AvalonBay Communities, Inc. As of September 30, 2022, the Company owned or held a direct or indirect ownership interest in 293 apartment communities containing 88,405 apartment homes in 12 states and DC.
- Cushman & Wakefield, with a portfolio of 172,000 units.
- Security Properties portfolio reflects interests in 113 assets encompassing nearly 22,354 multifamily housing units.
- Cardinal Group Holdings, LLC. 89,000 units managed with more than 100,000 beds and a heavy presence in student housing.
- CA Ventures Global Services LLC. Manages more than 60,000 beds in 69 university markets.
- DP Preiss Co. Specializes in student housing and has more than 30,000 beds in 12 states.
