The Wrist-Slappers Strike Again

A settlement with algorithmic collusion facilitator RealPage allows it to keep allegedly ill-gotten profits and continue innovating to raise rents.

https://prospect.org/2025/11/26/wrist-slappers-strike-again-realpage-antitrust/



If you made a million dollars robbing a bank, and were caught by the police, would you get away with merely promising never to do it again? Forget about how you would probably have to spend time in jail: Would you be able to keep the million dollars? Unfortunately for you, intrepid bank robber, you are not a corporation with a phalanx of lobbyists and a law enforcement adversary that doesn’t want to crimp your style. On Monday, the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division issued a holiday news dump, settling with algorithmic price-setting company RealPage, which was accused of colluding with landlords to raise rents. None of the nearly dozen states that have sued RealPage agreed to the settlement, and for good reason: It does not ask for any disgorgement (a fancy term for giving back ill-gotten gains), nor does it include an admission of guilt.

The settlement superficially adds restrictions to RealPage’s use of nonpublic information to raise prices. But again, this is the bank robber promising not to do it again, rather than returning the loot. And RealPage has already explored new horizons in creative price-setting maneuvers. In fact, RealPage’s attorney said that the settlement “bless[es] the legality of RealPage’s prior and planned product changes.” The disappointing result reflects something this country has struggled with for decades: a lack of courage to sanction the powerful. This is not limited to law enforcement. Last week, federal district court judge James Boasberg, who spent five years mostly delaying a monopoly case against Meta, decided that the company is not a social networking monopoly, because circumstances changed in the time between its acquisitions of competitors and his ruling. It’s hard not to see collusion between timid attorneys and timid judges to let big corporations run over anything in their path. But as this old mindset continues to stumble the country into oligarchy, a new mindset is asserting itself. While progress never proceeds in a straight line, there’s at least some hope that the future doesn’t have to be like the past.

To recap the RealPage case, the company promised landlord clients that it would generate “revenue lift between 3 percent to 7 percent” by feeding rental data in a metro area into an algorithm that recommended price increases. Then, RealPage agents would tell landlords that they risked losing access to the platform if they didn’t comply with hiking rents. This was a case of classic price-fixing. Don’t take my word for it: DOJ found an email from a landlord who expressed admiration for RealPage, because of the “classic price fixing.” Instead of landlords going into a room and deciding to raise prices, they would send data to the algorithm, which would do the colluding in the cloud. In the original complaint, state attorneys general sought disgorgement and other damages for overcharging tenants for years. A separate case brought by the state of New Jersey also sought disgorgement of profits. The proposed settlement contains none of that; RealPage gets to keep whatever it earned by bidding up the price of rent in markets it controlled. (A Biden White House report last year estimated that figure at $4 billion just in 2023.) It also gets to keep the data it acquired over the years. If the data was central to the violation of law, antitrust precedent suggests that enforcers could have demanded it be destroyed.

In what remains, the settlement attempts to solve a largely solved problem. The Justice Department had already initiated several settlements with large landlords like Greystar, requiring them to refrain from using pricing algorithms that share confidential data among competitors. (Notably, the state version of the settlement with Greystar and a separate class action lawsuit included monetary penalties; the DOJ settlement did not.) In effect, the settlement commits RealPage to stop doing what DOJ already got the biggest landlords to agree to stop doing. Specifically, RealPage must stop using or sharing nonpublic data to set rents, and cannot train its algorithm on active lease data (though it can use data that’s at least 12 months old). It cannot use incentives or otherwise force clients to accept price recommendations or limit rent decreases, and it cannot assess market effects in a geographic region smaller than the statewide level. It cannot seek this kind of nonpublic information through market surveys or discuss it in meetings with clients. And it must maintain a court-appointed compliance monitor for three years.

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