The Department of Justice just delivered a crushing blow to the property tech industry's most controversial player. RealPage, the rent-setting software that helps landlords across America price their units, has been forced into a sweeping settlement that fundamentally rewrites how the company can operate. The deal ends a high-stakes antitrust battle that could reshape how rental prices get set nationwide.
The Justice Department just rewrote the rules for one of America's most powerful rent-setting algorithms. RealPage, the software that helps landlords price millions of rental units, has been forced into a settlement that strips away its most potent competitive weapons and could fundamentally change how rents get set across the country.
The deal, announced late Sunday, represents a major victory for the Biden administration's aggressive antitrust agenda and sends shockwaves through the property technology sector. Under the settlement terms, RealPage can no longer use fresh competitive data to help landlords coordinate pricing - a practice the DOJ claimed was driving up rents for millions of Americans.
"RealPage was replacing competition with coordination, and renters paid the price," Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater said in announcing the settlement. The statement captures exactly what regulators feared most about algorithmic pricing: that software could enable the kind of price-fixing that would be illegal if done through direct communication.
The settlement's most devastating blow requires RealPage to only use landlord data that's at least 12 months old when powering its pricing algorithms. That's a death sentence for the company's core value proposition, which relied on near real-time market data to help properties stay competitive. Fresh pricing intelligence was exactly what landlords paid premium fees to access.
But the restrictions go deeper. RealPage must also "remove or redesign" any features that discourage landlords from lowering prices or prompt them to match competitor rates. The company is also banned from offering what Slater calls "hyperlocalized pricing" - the block-by-block rent optimization that she describes in a video on X as particularly harmful to renters.
The case traces back to last year's antitrust lawsuit, where the DOJ and several states accused RealPage of facilitating an illegal price-fixing scheme. The government argued that the company's software combined sensitive data from competing landlords to provide daily rental price suggestions that artificially inflated rents across markets.
