Massachusetts, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Washington suing landlords over pricing scheme that harm renters

BOSTON – The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office has joined the Justice Department in filing an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage and five of the nation’s largest landlords for participating in algorithmic pricing and other schemes that harm renters. In August 2024, an initial complaint was filed against RealPage for its unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing, and the amended complaint was filed Tuesday. Massachusetts joins the lawsuit in order to protect renters in Massachusetts from these alleged anticompetitive practices.  

The amended complaint alleges the landlords — Greystar Real Estate Partners LLC (Greystar); Blackstone’s LivCor LLC (LivCor); Camden Property Trust (Camden); Cushman & Wakefield Inc and Pinnacle Property Management Services LLC (Cushman); Willow Bridge Property Company LLC (Willow Bridge), and Cortland Management LLC (Cortland) — participated in an unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing, harming millions of renters across the country. Together, these landlords operate more than 1.3 million units in 43 states and the District of Columbia.  

Massachusetts joins the Department of Justice in suing five of these six landlords. The Justice Department announced a proposed consent decree that, if approved by the court, would resolve its claims against Cortland and would require the company to cooperate with the government, stop using its competitors’ sensitive data to train or run any rent-setting computer model, and stop soliciting, disclosing, or using any competitively sensitive information with any other property managers as part of setting rents. As a result, Massachusetts did not sue Cortland. 

The complaint alleges that RealPage violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act as well as Massachusetts consumer protection laws, including but not limited to by unlawfully sharing nonpublic, competitively sensitive information for use in competitors’ pricing and engaging in unfair methods of competition.  

“As residents continue to grapple with rising costs including high rents, our office will seek to hold accountable those who betray renters’ trust and undermine a fair and competitive housing market,” said Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell. “This lawsuit against RealPage and the named landlords is one step towards that accountability.”  

      “While Americans across the country struggled to afford housing, the landlords named in today’s lawsuit shared sensitive information about rental prices and used algorithms to coordinate to keep the price of rent high,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Doha Mekki of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. “Today’s action against RealPage and six major landlords seeks to end their practice of putting profits over people and make housing more affordable for millions of people across the country.”

The amended complaint alleges that the landlords actively participated in a scheme to set their rents using each other’s competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms. Along with using RealPage’s anticompetitive pricing algorithms, these landlords coordinated through a variety of means, including:  

• Directly communicating with competitors’ senior managers about rents, occupancy, and other competitively sensitive topics. In one example, Greystar supplied Camden with information not only about very recent renewal rates, but also its approach to pricing for the upcoming quarter, its acceptance of RealPage’s pricing recommendations, use of concessions, and competitively sensitive information about occupancy. Likewise, executives at Camden and LivCor communicated over the course of months about their pricing strategies, including plans for certain price increases.    

• Regularly conducting “call arounds.” During these discussions, euphemistically referred to as “market surveys,” property managers called or emailed competitors to share, and sometimes discuss, competitively sensitive information about rents, occupancy, pricing strategies and discounts.    

• Participating in “user groups” hosted by RealPage. For instance, landlords discussed via user groups how to modify the software’s pricing methodology, as well as their own pricing strategies. In one example, LivCor and Willow Bridge executives participated in a user group discussion of plans for renewal increases, concessions and acceptance rates of RealPage rent recommendations.  

• Sharing information with competitors about parameters in RealPage’s software. As an example, at the request of Willow Bridge’s director of revenue management, Greystar’s director of revenue management supplied its standard auto-accept parameters for RealPage’s software, including the daily and weekly limits and the days of the week for which Greystar used “auto-accept.”   

Massachusetts joins California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington as state co-plaintiffs in this matter. 

The Massachusetts AG’s Office seeks to end the illegal conduct, restore competition in the rental market, and recover civil penalties of up to $5,000 per each violation committed by the defendants.  

In Massachusetts, this matter is handled by Assistant Attorney General Katherine Krems and Deputy Division Chief Jennifer Greaney, both of AG Campbell’s Antitrust Division.