The DOJ lawsuit that says your rent was set by an algorithm, not the market
On August 23, 2024, the Department of Justice and eight state attorneys general filed a real federal antitrust complaint against RealPage, a software company whose pricing tool is used by landlords managing millions of rental units nationwide. The allegation: competing landlords fed the software their own private, non-public pricing and lease data, which RealPage then used to generate rent recommendations informed by what every other participating landlord was charging, coordinating pricing in a way no single landlord competing honestly would be able to replicate alone. The case settled in November 2025. This page covers what the government’s own complaint and the settlement actually establish.
// Mission Dossier
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Get the dossier: $8 instant download →The DOJ's complaint, filed in the Middle District of North Carolina and joined by North Carolina, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington, describes what antitrust law calls a hub-and-spoke conspiracy. RealPage sits at the hub. Competing landlords, the spokes, each shared non-public, competitively sensitive information about their own rental rates and lease terms with RealPage, which fed that pooled data into an algorithm generating rent recommendations back to every participating landlord. The complaint states this arrangement deprives the market of fully independent centers of decision-making on pricing, a formal legal description of collusion that never required the landlords to speak directly to each other, since the software did the coordinating instead.
On November 24, 2025, the DOJ and RealPage filed a proposed settlement, subject to court approval. RealPage admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to real, specific restrictions: it must stop using competitors' non-public data to train pricing models on active or forward-looking lease data, may only use historic data at least twelve months old, must remove features that limited price decreases or aligned pricing across competing users, and must accept a court-appointed monitor. Separately, several of the state attorneys general who joined the original complaint did not sign onto the settlement and may continue litigating independently, meaning the legal exposure for RealPage and its landlord customers is not fully closed.
On October 16, 2025, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed S.7882 into law, amending the state's Donnelly Act to prohibit residential landlords from using pricing algorithms to set rent at all, the first law of its kind in the country. A parallel multidistrict litigation and a separate case against a competing software company, Yardi, over similar allegations involving its Revenue IQ product, are both still active as of this writing.
This establishes that the federal government and eight states formally alleged, in a real filed legal complaint, that a specific software company enabled landlords to coordinate rental pricing in violation of federal antitrust law, and that the company agreed to real, court-enforceable restrictions on its practices without admitting fault. This is confirmed by the DOJ's own complaint and the subsequent settlement filing, both public federal court records.
What this does not establish is that any specific tenant's individual rent increase was directly caused by this practice, or that every landlord using RealPage's software was a knowing participant in coordinated pricing. The settlement resolves the federal case; several state claims and private litigation remain unresolved, meaning the full legal and factual picture is still developing.
Case: United States et al. v. RealPage, Inc. et al. Filed August 23, 2024, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.
Settlement: Proposed settlement filed November 24, 2025, subject to court approval.
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