We wrote last week about nine states’ settlement with the nation’s largest landlord, Greystar, and how it portended bad news for the Department of Justice (DOJ) civil case against RealPage:
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.
Well, the dirt pile under the rug just got a whole lot bigger. A few days before Thanksgiving, the DOJ announced in a holiday news dump that it’s settling its civil case with RealPage.
To recap, Greystar and other mega landlords used common software offered by the Texas-based, private equity-owned company RealPage in order to collect real-time pricing and supply levels, and then used that data to make unit-specific pricing and supply decisions in order to gouge the American commoners.
In December the DOJ closed its criminal investigation into RealPage. 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. In recent months states reached weak settlements with landlord behemoths like Cortland and Greystar who use RealPage as a price-fixing middleman. Those included couch change fines, but at least held out the possibility that they would need to stop using RealPage’s collusion software.
As we pointed out last week, however, the “limits” placed on the mega landlords—many of which are private-equity-owned using software created by RealPage,which is owned by private equity powerhouse Thoma Bravo— use of information-sharing software were dependent on the final federal judgement against RealPage.
So it effectively all came down to the Trump DOJ and its lawsuit against the company. And the DOJ basically declared open season on the American peasants.
Here’s Matt Stoller commenting on the outcome of the case, including bizarre attack on him from DOJ Antitrust Chief Gail Slater on the Twitter/X. It’s all well worth a read, but here’s the part explaining how RealPage and landlords will only need to make a few tweaks to keep robbing you:
The settlement is a set of “complex behavioral remedies” that have such a poor track record of being enforced. And they feel full of loopholes that will allow the company to approximate much of the earlier behavior. For instance, there are lots of different rules on “synthetic curves,” “unaffiliated property data,” “surrogate data,” exceptions of exceptions, and much of the terminology does not match up with the original complaint. If I were a defense lawyer trying to insert loopholes into a settlement, this kind of document is what I’d propose.
Take, for instance, the “synthetic curves,” mentioned previously which is essentially a list of prices that RealPage offers to help landlords set rents. The settlement says RealPage can’t offer the same synthetic curve to different clients, which would be a form of price-fixing. But it doesn’t say that RealPage can’t offer a similar synthetic curve to different clients. If RealPage slightly tweaks the list of prices, or uses last week’s curve, then that seems fine. Or maybe it’s not, it’s a gray area. Which means detecting a violation would be so difficult, and then complaining to a judge about such a violation would also be time-consuming. RealPage knows this agreement won’t be policed vigorously.
RealPage is obviously planning on continuing business as usual. Here’s what the company had to say about the settlement:
The settlement also provides greater certainty for housing providers and technology innovators that revenue management software can be operated confidently and in compliance with the views of federal antitrust enforcers…
The settlement reflects RealPage’s long-standing commitment to compliance and responsible innovation, ensuring our products continue to benefit both property owners and their residents.
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No findings or admissions of liability: The agreement includes no financial penalties, damages, or findings or admissions of wrongdoing.
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Continuity for customers: There is no disruption to customer operations. All RealPage solutions remain fully available, compliant, and configurable to meet evolving legal requirements.
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Formalizing product modifications already made or planned: The settlement essentially commits RealPage to the modifications to its revenue management solutions that it already has been implementing since over a year ago.
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Independent oversight: RealPage has agreed to an independent monitor to confirm the ongoing compliance of our revenue management products, reflecting our confidence in their integrity and our long-standing commitment to responsible operation and innovation.
A few notes.
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- The idea that RealPage’s software benefits residents is ludicrous and is contradicted in previous statements made by company officials, as well as those using its software.
For example, here’s company executive Andrew Bowen bragging about how 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.”
As we’ve detailed, there is strong reason to believe that RealPage and use of its collusion software by Wall Street landlords has been a major contributor to the ever-worsening homeless crisis in America.
“The Condition of Laboring Man at Pullman,” political cartoon from Chicago Labor Newspaper, July 7, 1894, which accurately sums up the situation faced by working Americans today. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
2. “Continuity for customers” means ongoing illegal behavior now blessed by the DOJ. Let’s review:
Here’s an Associate Vice President of one of the defendants talking up the collusionary aspect of the software, which was featured in RealPage’s own literature:
With LRO [RealPage’s Lease-Rent Options] we rarely make any overrides to the [pricing] recommendations . . . [W]e are all technically competitors, LRO helps us to work together . . . to make us all more successful in our pricing . . . LRO is designed to work with a community in pricing strategies, not work separately.”
RealPage’s “recommendations” is code for price-fixing:
To ensure that the landlords abide by these “recommendations,” RealPage puts significant “pressure” on them “to implement RealPage’s prices,” including by requiring clients to submit requests to deviate to the “corporate office” and tracking the “identity of the client’s staff that requested a deviation.” Multifamily Compl. ¶¶ 17-20, 261-86. As a result, landlords using RealPage adopt RealPage’s recommendations 80-90% of the time.
Furthermore, according to a March 2024 joint legal brief from the DOJ and FTC, even without the additional pressure, these types of recommendations via algorithm are still illegal:
It is per se illegal for competing landlords to jointly delegate key aspects of their pricing to a common algorithm, even if the landlords retain some authority to deviate from the algorithm’s recommendations. Although full adherence to a price-fixing scheme may render it more effective, the effectiveness of the scheme is not a requirement for per se illegality.
3. ““The settlement essentially commits RealPage to the modifications to its revenue management solutions that it already has been implementing since over a year ago.” That is likely referring to a tool RealPage rolled out offering its clients the ability to remove the use of nonpublic competitor data when calculating rent “recommendations.”
But here’s the problem, again from Stoller:
RealPage gets to keep its pricing advisors that tell landlords what to charge. The change is those advisors are not allowed to have broader meetings, but they are still allowed to have one-on-one conversations with landlords as long as those conversations are based on public data…
I find this to be an odd choice. How is a pricing advisor supposed to have a discussion solely based on public data or the client’s data? If a client says “what do you think about raising rents here” and that pricing advisor just talked to a different landlord who is raising prices, what are they supposed to say? Are they supposed to delete all the info in their head? Law firms have client conflicts for exactly this reason. This settlement is *asking* to be violated.
Add it all up, and it looks like Thoma Bravo likely met the Trump administration asking price. From Aug. 6, “MAGA Antitrust Agenda Under Siege by Lobbyists Close to Trump,” which 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.
And here we are.
Nine states who were co-plaintiffs with the Antitrust Division against RealPage did not sign on to the settlement, but is there a reason for hope there?
These are the same nine (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon and Tennessee) that just championed an offensive $7 million settlement from the nation’s largest landlord, Greystar.
In that same settlement they also inserted the following wiggle room that would allow the company to keep using RealPage software depending on the decision from the Trump DOJ. Here’s the text from the state’s deal with Greystar:
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…
For the avoidance of doubt, if only a RealPage-U.S. Final Judgment (but not a RealPage-Settling States-Final Judgment) is filed with the court by January 5, 2026, then Greystar may use a Revenue Management Product that complies with a RealPage-U.S. Final Judgment.
Well, the weight of federal antitrust law came down on RealPage like a feather, so it looks like the nation’s largest landlord and all its co-conspirators should be back up and running on tweaked collusion software in no time. And it’s obvious by now that the billionaire crybabies got what they paid for by supporting Trump and demanding that Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter be gone from their respective positions at the heads of the Federal Trade Commission and at the DOJ Antitrust Division (that’s not to assume a Kamala administration would be any better as she was also in the billionaires’ pocket and refused to commit to keeping Khan on).
RealPage, rather than being humbled by the DOJ settlement, looks emboldened. The company, fresh off its gift from the DOJ, is embracing its role as a flag bearer for the movement to equate illegal activity by the economic elite with free speech:
“Price gouging Americans for basic necessities” as a corporation’s First Amendment right, is what it looks like in a corrupt oligarchy where billionaires buy elections to control democracy. https://t.co/cXBFk1K5aU
— Melanie D’Arrigo (@DarrigoMelanie) November 26, 2025
That’s in addition to the free speech lawsuit the company has already filed against Berkeley, California over its ordinance barring landlords from using AI-driven pricing algorithms to set residential rents.
Additionally, the company continues to go full speed ahead with surveillance pricing and AI. Over the summer RealPage acquired Livble, a service that lets people pay their monthly rent in installments. More from The Verge:
Livble describes itself as a “flexible” rent payment solution. Renters can split payments into up to four installments throughout the month. The service bills itself as helping tenants “avoid late fees and credit card fees” as well as “build credit through rent,” but it charges $30 to $40 per loan…Under the deal, RealPage will integrate Livble into its property management software and will handle “all collections.”
But that’s not all Livble does:
“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
RealPage also recently unveiled its Lumina AI Workforce, which it says will feature “intelligent AI agents that work across leasing, operations, facilities, finance, and resident engagement.”
So we’re rapidly moving towards a situation where housing is dominated by Wall Street interests using software that coordinates pricing and has access to your financial data with decisions increasingly being made by AI. And the DOJ just said that’s A-OK.
