The Department of Justice (DOJ) and RealPage have reached a settlement regarding its revenue management services for the multifamily industry.
“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,” noted assistant attorney general Abigail Slater of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division.
According to RealPage, the settlement provides resolution for its customers and the overall multifamily industry.
“This resolution with the DOJ was necessary to provide certainty and finality for RealPage and its customers to avoid protracted litigation,” said RealPage outside counsel Stephen Weissman, a Gibson Dunn partner and former deputy director for the Federal Trade Commission. “While we deny any wrongdoing, we appreciate the constructive engagement by DOJ and its willingness to bless the legality of RealPage’s prior and planned product changes under federal antitrust law through the consent decree.”
The proposed consent judgment includes no financial penalties, damages, or admissions of wrongdoing as well as no disruption for customers. It does commit RealPage to modifications to its revenue management solutions—such as not having the software use competitors’ nonpublic information to determine rental prices; not using active lease data for purposes of training the models; and redesigning features that limited pricing decreases or aligned pricing between competitive users of the software—which the company has been implementing for over a year. RealPage also has agreed to an independent monitor to confirm ongoing compliance of its revenue management products.
“There has been a great deal of misinformation about how RealPage’s software works and the value it provides for both housing providers and renters,” added Weissman. “We believe that RealPage’s historical use of aggregated and anonymized nonpublic data, which include rents that are typically lower than advertised renters, has led to lower rents, less vacancies, and more pro-competitive effects.”